A YOUTHFUL PRODICY.

Rangitikei Advocate and Manawatu Argus, Volume XXXIV, Issue 9653, 5 January 1910, Page 7

A YOUTHFUL PRODICY.

AN UNDERGRADUATE AT

ELEVEN,

William James Sidis, 11 years of ago, !has Just been admitted as a student at Harvard University. All the ago records of the old University at Cambridge are shattered by this boy in knickerbockers, and still the fact remains that this as the ttnra autumn that he has knocked tor admission to the University. -The faculty until now has refused to aamit him because of his age. other drawback can well work against him, it would seem, upon inquiry into the details of his life. He Is a prodigy—nothing else—whose precocity is the frait of a parental theory of mind growth put into practice from the beginning of his life. Young Sidis is the son of Hr. Boris Sidis, a Boston psychologist, who years before the boy’s birth held advanced ideas upon child-training. On the basis that as scon as a child oegiua to grow its brain begins to grow also, and that the brain is less and less sensitive to training as age increases. Dr. Sidis had planned and developed an elaborate system of training. The system ho applied to his sou. First taught by moans or lettered blocks the child could talk, read, and spell at the same time before ho was two years of ago- He then started to oonnt, and his father handed him some calendars so that ho might amuse himself. He was only three years old when he startled his parents by announcing that he was able to toll on what day oi the week any given date would fall. He was tested on this, and did not fail. Upon investigation it was found out that the child had worked out by himself a method of counting, enabling him to mentally calculate any date demanded of him. This sounds like Jules Yeine. says au exchange, but it is proven fact that tins boy as four was an expert typewriter operator. At five he had begun to study French and Latin, and had written a text-book on anatomy and another on English grammar—presumably for his own use. Entering a grammar school when six years of age, he moved up several grudea in six mouths, and cutofod the high school at the age of eight years. la six weeks there he had completed the mathematical course, and had begun writing a book on astronomy. Then he plunged into the study of German, French, Latin, and Russian.’.,: On leaving school he began the study "of mathematics _ in real earnest. Integral and infinitesimal calculus became his hobbies, and in addition he invented a system of logarithms based on the number la instead of 10. This bits been Inspected by several well-known mathematicians and pronounced perfect in every detail. Of course, young Sidis is a prodigy. Afc 11 ho is declared to ds the most learned undergraduate who has over entered Harvard, and the wonderfully successful result of a scientific forcing experiment. He is one of the most interesting mental phenomena in history Bat most interesting of all is the faotjinat he may bo the typo of the generations of man. In an age which rievoteaitaelf to making the most of opportunities of every sort greater and more scientific attention to the training of children may yet bring mental capacity of which we humans of to-day cannot have more than the slightest conception. We hear interesting theories of the mental development of the Martians, who, according to a British dispatch this week have apparently all been killed by a mighty convulsion of Nature, and the conjectures of their developments show ns, in comparison, as the savages of an earlier day on earth.