ever in intellectual
imbecility. There is an account in the Memoires de l'Academie Royale,
p. xxii-xxiii, 1703, of a young man born deaf and dumb,[10] who
recovered his hearing at the age of four-and-twenty, and who, after
employing himself in repeating low to himself the words which he heard
others pronounce, at length broke silence in company, and declared
that he could talk. His conversation was but imperfect; he was
examined by several able theologians, who chiefly questioned him on
his ideas of God, the soul, and the morality or immorality of actions.
It appeared that he had not thought upon any of these subjects; he did
not distinctly know what was meant by death, and he never thought of
it. He seemed to pass a merely animal life, occupied with sensible,
present objects, and with the few ideas which he received by his sense
of sight; nor did he seem to have gained as much knowledge as he might
have done, by the comparison of these ideas; yet it is said that he
did not appear naturally deficient in understanding.

Peter, the wild boy, who is mentioned in Lord Monboddo's Origin of
Language,[11] had all his senses in remarkable perfection. He lived at
a farm house within half a mile of us in Hertfordshire for some years,
and we had frequent opportunities of trying experiments upon him. He
could articulate imperfectly a few words, in particular, _King
George_, which words he always accompanied with an imitation of the
bells, which rang at the coronation of George the Second; he could in
a rude manner imitate two or three common tunes, but without words.
Though his head, as Mr. Wedgewood and many others had remarked,
resembled that of Socrates, he was an idiot: he had acquired a few
automatic habits of rationality and industry, but he could never be
made to work at any continued occupation: he would shut the door of
the farm-yard five hundred times a day, but he would not reap or make
hay. Drawing water from a neighbouring river was the only domestic
business which he regularly pursued. In 1779 we visited him, and tried
the following experiment. He was attended to the river by a person who
emptied his buckets repeatedly after Peter had repeatedly filled them.
A shilling was put before his face into one of the buckets when it was
empty; he took no notice of it, but filled it with water and carried
it homeward: his buckets were taken from him before he reached the
house and emptied on the ground; the shilling, which had