THE WOLF. 133 



currently believed in India that they conceal a frightful amount of 

 secret assassination, and that an enormous number of deaths, 

 especially in the case of women and children, who are poisoned 

 for family reasons, are set down as due to snake-bites, it being 

 a convenient way of hiding the fact that they were murdered. 



We are all acquainted with the historical fable that affirms the 

 twin founders of Rome, Romulus and Remus, were suckled by 

 wolves, a fiction arising from the simple circumstance of their 

 nurse's name having been " Lupa," but that as a matter of fact 

 they do so nurture children is gravely asserted in a pamphlet 

 published in Plymouth in 1852, called " An Account of "Wolves 

 Nurturing Children in their Dens," by an Indian official, who it 

 was stated was Colonel Sleeman, the exterminator of the Thugs, 

 and the author of several works on India. At the time it created a 

 sensation, and some correspondents to the newspapers mentioned 

 several other instances than the ones therein narrated that had 

 come within their own experience. 



Most of these " wolf-children " seem to have been reared in the 

 county of Oude ; but the fact of the idiots who are said to have 

 been nourished in this way ever having been taken away originally 

 by wolves, or even been found in their dens, is not authenticated by 

 the testimony of any reliable eye-witness, and the facts narrated 

 simply rest on hearsay evidence. A great many stories of this 

 character are of ancient date, but some errors die hard, and we 

 are therefore not surprised to find them occasionally being re- 

 peated with modern versions. Thus prefacing an account of one 

 of these young Indian Romuluses narrated to the writer of the 

 article by an officer in the Company's service, the Illustrated News 

 in 1858 has the following : — " An English traveller, who visited the 

 menagerie of the King of Oude some years ago, relates his having 

 seen in a cage adjoining that of some tigers a maramiferous animal 

 of the gems homo, or something very nearly allied to it ; the keeper 

 pointed it out to him as a jtmglee he admee, or wild man, a biped 

 which for many years had been one of the chief -ornaments of the 

 menagerie, and whose habits were perfectly similar to its four- 

 footed companions. Mute as the hygena of the adjoining cage, he 

 never failed, like his neighbour the tiger, to take a siesta regu- 



