TARZANS IN REAL LIFE

Evening Star, Issue 18159, 27 December 1922, Page 6

TARZANS IN REAL LIFE

"— WOLVES REAR CHILDREN. Many people who have read ‘ Tarzau of the Apes ’ or ecen it on the films have considered that the whole story was merely a romance—a freak of the novelist’s weird and fantastic imagination. But here again truth is stranger than fiction, and many oases almost..as strange as Tarzan’s have been related by reliable travellers. Some years ago Sir Roderick Murchison gave eome extracts from the journal of the Hon. Captain Francis Egerton, R.N., who had travelled in India. It relates to a number of children, natives of Oude, who are stated, on the authority of Colonel Sleeman, to have been, carried away and brought up by wolves. “ Tho colonel is acquainted with five instances of this, in two of which he has both, seen the chidlren and knows tire circumstances connected with their recapture from the animals.” Wolves are stated to be very numerous in certain parte of India, and children, are constantly being carried off by them. Most of these are no doubt devoured, but some have been brought up, to a certain age, by their captors. Two of the King of (hide’s sowars, or mounted gendarmes, when riding along the banks of the Goomptjo River, observed three animals come down to drink. Two were evidently young wolves, but the third was more like some other animal, and when captured was found to he in reality a small naked boy. He was on all fours like his companions, had callosities on his knees and elbows, and hit and scratched violently in resisting capture. He was brought up in Lucknow, where he lived for some time. He was quite unable to articulate words, but had a doglilce intellect, quick at understanding signs and so on. Another boy is stated to have been found under the same circumstances, and lived with two English people for some time. He leamt at last to pronounce tho name of a lady who was kind to him; but though he evinced some degree of affection, his intellect was always clouded and more like the instinct of a dog than the mind of a human being. The Earl) of Ellesmere mentioned that a story identical in all its particulars was related to him in the Highlands by an old forester of the “ Rcay country.” There is a_ Gaelic tradition that wolves so abounded in Sutherlandshire at one time that it was usual to bury the dead in the Island of Handy to avoid desecration of the graves. Profeasor Owen states that he does not see very great improbability in these statements being true, and Sir R, Murchison observes that, if substantiated, we may return to the belief of our childhood that Romulus and' Remus were really suckled by a wolf.