Homo ferus: Between Monster and Model
Most studies of human monstrosity, however, found inspiration in the exciting new developments in embryology rather than in the static morphology of Linnaeus' system. They sought to demonstrate that anomalies were biologically reproduced, based on real, material connections, not just on similar appearance or similar traits. Some speculated that feral children were products of incongruous couplings like those that produce mules—perhaps between women and bears or women and apes.[16] While often discredited, accounts of animal-human interbreeding abound in eighteenth-century natural histories and reveal a curiosity mixed with repulsion for hybrids of all kinds. In 1699 Edward Tyson presented an account of a man-pig to the Royal Society; in 1757 Delisle de Sales claimed to have seen a girl with the head and feet of a monkey and records the exhibit of a calf-child and a wolf-child in Lyon in the 1750s; and Maupertuis exhorted the scientific community to experiments that might create new and more beautiful species of humans and animals.[17] Such creatures, and other specimens of physical abnormality, like the "Porcupine Man" and the albino Negro, were fascinating as grotesque carnival attractions and as clues to the mechanism of generation: they provided counter-examples to normal embryological development and fueled debates between advocates of preformationism and epigenesis.[18]
The possibility of miscegenation with inferior species also raised the terrifying specter, however, of man's degeneration from an idealized prototype. Just as travelers had shocked readers with sordid descriptions of miserable Hottentots and abject Eskimos, news of quadruped, herbivorous children found in Europe challenged the European belief that civilization guaranteed an elevated standard of humanity. Delisle de Sales contended: "nous aimâmes mieux croire que des ours engendraient des hommes, que de penser qu'un homme pouvait produire un quadrupède" (De la Philosophie de la nature, 5:408-9). Perhaps the bizarre appetites and conduct of the Homines feri manifested mankind's primitive, original nature or its inevitable degradation in the absence of civilizing influences. Rousseau opts for the latter in his Discours sur l'origine et les fondements de l'inégalité parmi les hommes (1755), although he sees the wild child's idiocy as an emblem of human frailty rather than failed civilization:
These ideas of the inherent limited intellect and physical decline raised humbling questions about man's supposed nobility of soul and superiority over animals, and undermined the notion that language is innate to humankind. If the wild children were not aberrant individuals but exemplars of wild Nature (understood as an inexorable physical force, indifferent to man), their experience would have to be read differently—as a cautionary or edifying tale. Moreover, such a perspective forced Enlightenment philosophers to rethink traditional distinctions between le physique and le moral.
II. Peter of Hanover: Primitive Paragon or Perfectible Man?
Although the details surrounding Peter's capture in the forest near Hamelen, Germany, in 1724 vary enormously,[20] most accounts agree that he was wearing the remains of a shirt and subsisting on acorns, berries, and tree bark. His age was between eleven and fifteen. Some claim he ran about on all fours, others that he was erect. Although his sense of smell was acute, he was insensitive to noxious odors such as his own excrement; he refused food, preferring instead to suck the sap from raw wood. When brought to London, Peter was entrusted to Dr. John Arbuthnot for the purpose of investigating the innate ideas of the wild boy. Although detainable only by force, he gradually accepted clothes and appeared in London society and at court, where he disappointed expectations by his general indifference to women. Arbuthnot abandoned his instruction after only two months; and with a royal pension, Peter was placed with one of the queen's chamber-women, and later with a farmer in Hertfordshire, where he lived out his "vegetory existence" as a kind of "very old child."[21 ]He never learned to speak more than a few words but developed some sensitivity to music and mastered table manners and polite comportment. His curiosity value apparently continued well into his dotage; late in his sixties he was visited by such well-known intellectuals as the Scottish judge Lord Monboddo, the Anglo-Irish inventor Richard Lovell Edgeworth, and his novelist daughter, Maria Edgeworth. Looking back on their visits in the 1770s, the Edgeworths note that Peter received gifts from "curious strangers" and amassed a collection of coins thanks to the farmer's wife, who "collected the price of his daily exhibition."[22]
