ck striking, on the first morning, though Feuerbach says that he
did not hear the bells for several days.

Such is Kaspar's written account (1829); the published account of July
1828, derived from 'the expressions of a half-dumb animal' (as
Feuerbach puts it), is much more prolix and minute in detail. The
animal said that he had sat on the ground, and never seen daylight,
till he came to Nuremberg. He used to be hocussed with water of an
evil taste, and wake in a clean shirt. 'The man' once hit him and hurt
him, for making too much noise. The man taught him his letters and the
Arabic numerals. Later he gave him instructions in the art of
standing. Next he took him out, and taught him about nine words. He
was made by the man to walk he knew not how far, or how long, the man
leading him. Nobody saw this extraordinary pair on the march.
Feuerbach, who maintains that Kaspar's feet were covered with cruel
blisters, from walking, also supposes that 'perhaps for the greater
part of the way' he was carried in a carriage or waggon! Whence then
the cruel blisters caused by walking? There is medical evidence that
his legs were distorted by confinement, but the medical _post-mortem_
evidence says that this was not the case. He told Binder that his
windows were shuttered: he told Hiltel, the gaoler, that from his
windows he saw 'a pile of wood and above it the top of a tree.'

Obviously Kaspar's legends about himself, whether spoken in June 1828,
or written in February 1829, are absurdly false. He was for three
weeks in the tower, and was daily visited by the curious. Yet in these
three weeks the half-conscious animal 'learned to read tolerably well,
to count, to write figures' (_that_ he could do when he arrived,
Feuerbach says), 'he made progress in writing a good hand, and learned
a simple tune on the harpsichord,' pretty well for a half-unconscious
animal.

In July 1828, after being adopted by the excited town of Nuremberg, he
was sent to be educated by and live with a schoolmaster named Daumer,
and was studied by Feuerbach. They found, in Kaspar, a splendid
example of the 'sensitive,' and a noble proof of the powers of 'animal
magnetism.' In Germany, at this time, much was talked and written
about 'somnambulism' (the hypnotic state), and about a kind of 'animal
magnetism' which, in accordance with Mesmer's theory, was supposed to
pass between stars, metals, magnets, and human beings. The effects
produced on the patient by th