Project Gutenberg's Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 446, by Various

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Title: Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 446
Volume 18, New Series, July 17, 1852

Author: Various

Editor: William Chambers
Robert Chambers

Release Date: March 13, 2007 [EBook #20806]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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CHAMBERS' EDINBURGH JOURNAL

CONDUCTED BY WILLIAM AND ROBERT CHAMBERS, EDITORS OF 'CHAMBERS'S
INFORMATION FOR THE PEOPLE,' 'CHAMBERS'S EDUCATIONAL COURSE,' &c.

No. 446. NEW SERIES. SATURDAY, JULY 17, 1852. PRICE 1-1/2_d._

WOLF-CHILDREN.

It is a pity that the present age is so completely absorbed in
materialities, at a time when the facilities are so singularly great
for a philosophy which would inquire into the constitution of our
moral nature. In the North Pacific, we are in contact with tribes of
savages ripening, sensibly to the eye, into civilised communities; and
we are able to watch the change as dispassionately as if we were in
our studies examining the wonders of the minute creation through a
microscope. In America, we have before us a living model, blind, mute,
deaf, and without the sense of smell; communicating with the external
world by the sense of touch alone; yet endowed with a rare
intelligence, which permits us to see, through the fourfold veil that
shrouds her, the original germs of the human character.[1] Nearer
home, we have been from time to time attracted and astonished by the
spectacle of children, born of European parents, emerging from forests
where they had been lost for a series of years, fallen back, not into
the moral condition of savages, but of wild beasts, with the
sentiments and even the instincts of their kind obliterated for ever.
And now we have several cases before us, occurring in India, of the
same lapses from humanity, involving circumstances curious in
themselves, but more important than curious, as throwing a strange
light upon what before was an impene