A CHILD OF NATURE.

Otago Witness, Issue 2299, 24 March 1898, Page 58

A CHILD OF NATURE.

By Dinornis.

Every age has its fads, and one of the biggest fads of the eighteenth century took the form of a hunt for " the natural man." It seems very droll to us nowadays that less than 200 years agone poets, philosophers, and people in general should persist in staring so far beyond their own noses in quest of " the natural man," while all the time this long, eagerly-sought-for individual was very conspicuously present in their midst. During the period alluded to the doctrine, or notion rather, that children were born possessed of "innate ideas" was the subject of very warm discussion, and controversialists were forever bringing themselves to loggerheads over it. TRe most absurd fancies w?7e pub forward and supported by a buefe amount of airy, confident theorising, but with very iittie appeal to actuv.l facts. Those who upheld the belief in " innate ideas" — and they were by no means few or insignificant among the scholars of the period — asserted that their doctrine could be proven from a study of the not easy to find " natural man." .They held that the members of European and other communities were from birth bo influenced by surround ir g icfluences that their " naturalness " was destroyed — that the influences of civilisation v/ere mostly of a harmfully artificial and degenerative kind, and that only by the study of children who bad grown up in complete isolation from their kiad could we ascertain what' was tha ! actual mental and even physical state of the natural man. Z=alols in this strange belief were not likely to be without a passing instance now and then of a kind to emphasise and illustrate their views. Europe, and even some parts of the British Islep, had wild iracts of practically unexplored country wherein many of the denizens led a seiniftivsge and degraded life. For ordinarilyendowed individuals living in such situations f xistence could not have had many exbilara- ! ;ng qualities ; while for unfortunate wi etches ; fflicted by lack of mental vigour life must i:t many instances bave been a terrible j crdeal. Examples, some of which have become historic, turned up now and then in rhe shape of wild men, women, and children, sometimes caught by actual hunting, sometimes straying into busy human haunts, H-emirg like visitors from an inferior worl3. To ourselves these poor pariahs, wandering sriid and unkempt, often entirely unclad, in w.stes and solitudes, could only appear to i.c occasional products of misfortune, penury, n?gkc 1- , and hate. By many, amorg even the acutesUminded philosophers of the last century; such outcasts were held to be veritable individuals of species different from our own, and were very frt quently named and " described " as sneb. The great Lim seas 1 W3P a believer in this kind of thing, and hs ; is the author .of Borne high-sounding Latin j psarages descriptive of the peculiarities of homo sapiens fir us. Others — some of them mainfcainiiig that "the natural man" went en aIA fours, rom& that he would eafc only v« getable food — were not less pronounced in dogicatic tenacity about their veiws of this won- i derJol "natural man " of theirs. Trustworthy j liistorifs of such wild human beings are j scarcely to be got, for ever-fertile invention j 'stfon surrounded the bald facts with clouds oC myth and fablo. To select an instance, however, the story of " Peter, I*1 '* a wild boy, who lived many years in England, is one o£ j the most authentic casss ; and his biography will answer the empose very well. la July 1724, Jurgen Meyer, a townsman x>£ Hamelu, I met in his field with a naked, brownish, black-haired boy, apparently about 12 years old, who uttered no sound ; was enticed, by showing him two apples, into the town, and placed for safe custody in a hospital by order of the burgomaster Severin. Peter — thus he was christened by the children on his jirst appearance in the town, and he went by the same to his death — behaved rather brutishly at first : seeking to gat out at doors and windows, resting now and then on his knees and elbows, and rolling himself from side to Bide till he fell asleep. He did not like bread, but he eagerly peeled green Bticks and chewed the peel for the juice, as he also j did vegetables, grass, and bean shells. He soon learned to conduct himself more pro- ! perly, and was allowed to go about the town. When anything wa3 offered him to eat he first smelt it, and then put it in his mouth or laid it aside, shaking his head. In the same way he would smell people's hands, and then strike his breast if pleased, or otherwise -bhake his head. When he particularly liked anything, as bean?, peas, mulberries, fruit, ] acd particularly onions and nuts, he indicated his satisfaction by striking repeatedly on his chest. When shoes were first given to him he could not walk in them, and appeared happy in getting rid of them and running about again barefooted. Covering the head was equally unpleasant to him, and he enjoyed greatly throwing his hat or cap into the Weser and seeing it swim down. But he soon became accustomed to clothing. Hi 3 hearing and smell were acute. In October 1725 he was sent for by George I to Hanover ; whence he was transmitted to London in the beginning of the followirg year, under the care of a king's messenger ; and this was the foundation of his fame and fortune. Just at this time controversy about the existence of innate ideas was at its height, and Peter seemed tb.3 very subject for determining the question. Count Zinzendcrf wished that he should be entrusted to his charge, that he might watch the development of his "innate ideas"; but the King had already placed him at the disposal of the Princess of Wales, the afterwards celebrated Qacen Caroline, who confided the precious trust to Dr Arbuthnot, still for the purpose of investigating his innate ideas. Swift has immortalized him in his production, "It Cannot Eain but it Pcura ; or, London Strewed with Rarities ; " Linnreus i gave him a niche in the " SysLorua Natuise," tinder the denomination of " Jnvenis Hanoveranus"; JBuffon, De Paauw, and J. J. Rousseau have extolled him as the true chiid of Nature, the genuine unsophisticated man. Monboddo is still more enthusiastic, declar-

I * Lectures ou "The Natural History of Man." . by William Lawrence, F.R.S.

ing his appearance to be a. much more important occurrence than the discovery of the planet Uranus, or than if astronomers to the catalogue of stars already known had added 30,000 new ones. Amidst these expectations and honours a few circumstances were either unknown or overlooked calculated to raise great doubts of Peter's fitness for such high destinies, and to produce an unpleasant suspicion that he had not entirely escaped the contaminating influence of civilised life. When he was first met with a small fragment of a shirt hung about his neck, and the whiteness of bis thighs compared to bis brown legs proved that he must have worn breeches', but nofc stockings. His tongue was very lajge, and little capable of motion, so that an army surgeon at Hameln thought of attempting to sefc it free by cutting the frenum, but did not perform the operation. Further, some boatmen in descending the Weser ' ud <*6un at d'fferect points on the oanks of tbe ri^er a naked boy, and given him gometbu-g to cat; and, Jastly, it. was ascertained that a widower at Luch- ■ tringen had had a dumb child, who, having been lost in the woods in 1723, returned home again, but on his father's second marriage waß driven out again by his stepmother. Dr Arbuthnot soon found out that no brilliant discoveries in psychology or anthropology could be expected from the case of this poor idiot ; he was therefore placed with a farmer in Hertfordshire, where he continued to live, or rather vegetate, till 1785. Peter, was of a middle ,~ize, - somewhat-rr-bsst in appearance, and strong, and had a respectable beard. He took the ordinary mixed diet, retaining his early fondness for onions. He liked warmtb, and relished a glass of brandy. Ha always showed the most perfect indifference to the other sex. ■, He could not be taught, to speak: tbe plainest of the few articulate sounds he could ! utter were " Peter," "ki sbo," and %< qui ca," | the two latter bticg attempts at pronouncing j " Kicg George '" a»d " Queen Caroline." He bad a taste for mn3ic, and would hum over various airs that ha oiten heard ; when an instrumental performance took place he would jump about with great delight till he was quite tir«d. He waa deficient in one important privilege of nature, having never ke?n seen to laugh. He wes a harmless and obeaient creature, and could be employed in little domestic offices, or in the fields, bub not without superintendence. Having been left to .himself to throw up a load of dung into a cart, j aa soon as he had executed th 6 task, he j jumped up and safe to woik as diligently te j throw ifc all out again. ! Having, on osr.e occasion, wandared away j from home as far as Norfolk, at the time when, great alarms existed about the Pre1 ender and his emissaries, he was brought before a justice of tho peace as a suspicious character, and making no answ.er to any interrogatories was deemed contumacious, and rent to prison. A firo broke outia the night, -when be was found sitting quietly in a corner, .eDJoyingthe light and warmth very much, and EOt at all williEg to move. Such wan this famous representative of unsophisticated hunaan nature ! Although P^-ter was littlecapabls of filing thai; high situation, his history affords a, strikiug and useful caution by exhibiting the uncertainty ot human" testimony and histori- j cal evidence. No two accounts agree in the j year, season, and place of his discovery ; and j later printed histories contain serious narratives of George I having found him in hunting at Herrenhausen, or in the Harz ; that it was necessary to cut down the tree i in the top oE which he had taken refuge; that his body was covered with hair ; and that he ran on all fours ; that he jumped about trees like a squirrel, knew how to get the bait; out of traps placed for wolves,; that he was carried over to England in an iron cage, learned to speak In nine months at the court o£ the Qneen, was baptized afc the house of Dc Arbuthnot, and soon after died. Peter was, in fact, merely an ordinary dumb child thrown amongst extraordinarily unfortunate circumstances in his early years. ; Had he been more happily circumstanced ha would quite likely have grown up without displaying remarkable characteristics.