1892.] Mental Evolution in Man and Lower Animals. 605 
after four days sent to an English officer, Captain Nicholetts. 
He was kindly treated, but he never learned to speak; he 
would fly at children and try to bite them, and ran to eat his 
food on all-fours. But he was friendly with a pariah dog, and 
would let him share his food. He would suck up a whole 
pitcher of milk. He never laughed or smiled, destroyed all 
his clothes, and in two years and a half ended his short life 
of piteous degradation, speaking once or twice as he la 
dying, the words for water and aching head. Another child, 
caught in the same neighborhood, was even more savage, and 
would only eat raw flesh, on which he put his hands as a dog 
puts its fore-feet. His knees and knuckles were quite hard 
with running on all-fours. He was quite untamable, and at 
last lived in the village street with the pariah dogs, going 
every night into the jungle. A third boy, caught at Hasan- 
pur, exhibited the same characteristics, his favorite playmates 
being the jungle wolves, which would caper round him and 
lick him. In all these cases the characteristics of relapsed 
man are the same; he walks and runs well on all-fours, can- 
not be taught to speak, lives on raw food, and drinks by suc- 
tion, as a horse or cow drinks. 
Now if language be a God-given endowment exempt from 
the usual laws of evolution, a wild boy with uninjured brain 
should be able to learn to speak readily; indeed, he should be 
- able to evolve some form of speech by himself. If, however, 
articulate speech is the result of long ages of evolution from 
- speechless ancestors we can understand that the centre for 
articulate speech in the human brain requires stimulating and 
cultivating from early infancy; and if not so stimulated and 
cultivated will fail to exercise a faculty acquired comparatively 
late in the evolution of the species. With regard to other 
characteristics, every little child goes on all-fours, and not like 
any other animals, on the toes or soles of the feet, but on the 
knees. And every infant at first tries to “drink like a calf,” 
putting its mouth into a cup to suck up the milk, and only 
slowly learning to drink from the edge. 
It seems to me that the weight of evidence afforded by facts 
is in favor of the hypothesis that the human mind has fol- 
