think so, considering the persecuting though
sensible mode of education adopted by M. Itard.

In leading the wild boy to the use of speech,
M. Itard was far from successful. Finding he
had a preference for the vowel O, the tutor gave
the boy the name of Victor, to which he always
came. After great difficulty he was taught the
word lait; but he used it for everything, and
generally to show pleasure at anything. He
next learnt the use of the liquid l, lia, which he
caught from the name of Julia, a little daughter
of his goveniess, to whom he seemed attached.
His last and final acquisition was the exclamation
"O Dieu!" which he learnt from Madame
Guerin, his governess. He pronounced it "O
Diie!" In signs to express his wants, he was,
however, quite a pantomimist. His conduct to
the often impertinently curious Parisians who
visited him, was droll from its extreme sincerity:

"A great number of the curious know how,
with more natural frankness than politeness, he
dismissed them, when fatigued with the length
of their visits; he presents to each of them, and
yet without a countenance of contempt, their
cane, gloves, and hat, pushes them gently
towards the door, which afterwards he violently
shuts upon them."

M. Itard's succeeding effort was to follow
out Sicard's plan, of deaf-and-dumb education,
and to show the boy the connexion between
words and objects. He drew keys, scissors,
&c., on a black board, and hung below the
outline drawings the objects indicated. Victor was
then taught to select them when transposed,
and rearrange them in proper order. This
not succeeding very well, M. Itard tried pieces
of coloured paper, and these Victor soon learned
to associate with the objects on which they had
at first been placed. At last the temper of the
savage broke out as the tasks grew more
numerous and complicated. He threw down the
pasteboards, and ran to his bed in a fury. From
there he was always again led back to his work.

"My perseverance," says the preceptor,
"lasted only a few days; for it was at length
overcome by the unconquerable independence of
his spirit. His emotions of anger became more
frequent, more violent, and resembled the
paroxysms of rage similar to those of which I
have already spoken; but with this striking
difference, that the effects of his passion were
now less directed towards persons than things.
He would, when he was in this humour, gnaw
the bed-clothes, even the mantelpiece, throwing
about in his chamber the fire-irons, the cinders,
and the burning coals, and would conclude the
scene by falling into convulsions, which seemed
to be of a nature somewhat analogous to those
of epilepsy—a complete suspension of the
sensorial functions. I was obliged to yield when
things had arrived at this pitch; and yet my
acquiescence had no other effect than to increase
the evil; its paroxysms became more frequent,
and liable to be renewed by the least opposition,
often even without any evident cause."

M. Itard felt that the crisis had arrived. Once
victorious, the boy would be for ever untamable.
He resolved to follow the plan of the
great Boerhaave, at the Harlem madhouse.
The boy had a great terror of looking down from
a height. In one of his paroxysms, before
epilepsy had supervened, M. Itard says:

"I suddenly opened the window of the chamber,
which was on the fourth story, looking
down upon a rough pavement. I approached
him with every appearance of fury, and seizing
him forcibly, I held him out of the window, his
face directly turned towards the bottom of this
precipice. When, after some seconds, I
withdrew him from this situation, he appeared pale,
covered with a cold sweat, his eyes moistened
with tears, and still agitated with a slight
trembling, which I attributed to the effects of
fear. I then took him again to his boards; I
made him gather up his scattered papers, and
insisted that they should be all replaced. All
this was executed, although, it must be
confessed, in a slow and rather slovenly manner.
He did not, however, venture to betray any
impatience. After it was done, he threw himself
on his bed, and burst into a flood of tears."

The boy's indignation after this took only the
simpler form of murmurs and tears. Victor, once
subdued, soon learned to arrange his pasteboard
alphabet, to combine words, and to distinguish
many of the objects which they stood for. At
last, when he went for his daily walk to one citizen
Lemert's, where he used to have milk given
him, he would secrete the letters L a i t, and,
when he got there, arrange them on the table to
imply his want.

From these experiments, valuable as the first
step in that philanthropic and excellent task,
the education of idiots, M. Itard, a disciple of
Locke and Condillac, drew the following deductions,
utterly opposed to the wild and poetical
theories of Rousseau:

"1. That man is inferior to a great number
of animals in a pure state of nature, a state of
vacuity and barbarism, although it has been
unjustly painted in colours the most attractive; a
state in which the individual, deprived of the
characteristic faculties of his species, drags on
miserably, equally without intelligence and without
affections, a life that is every moment
subject to danger, and confined to the bare
functions of animal nature.

"2. The next conclusion that may be drawn
is, that moral superiority which has been said to
be natural to man, is merely the result of
civilisation, which raises him above other animals by
a great and powerful stimulus. This stimulus
is the predominant sensibility of his species, the
essential property from which flow the faculties
of imitation, and that unintermitting propensity
which forces him to seek, in new wants, new
sensations.

"3. It may be observed that this imitative
power, adapted for the education of all his
organs, and especially for the acquisition of
speech, although very energetic and active
during the first years of life, is rapidly enfeebled
by the progress of age, insulation, and all the
other causes which tend to deaden the nervous