AN HISTORICAL ACCOUNT OF THE DISCOVERY AND EDUCATION OF A SAVAGE MAN

OR OF THE FIRST DEVELOPMENTS, PHYSICAL AND MORAL, OF THE YOUNG SAVAGE CAUGHT IN THE WOODS NEAR AVEYRON, IN THE YEAR 1798.

BY E. M. ITARD, Physician to the National Institution of Deaf and Dumb, Member of the Medical Society of Paris, &c.

London, PRINTED FOR RICHARD PHILLIPS, NO. 71, ST. PAUL'S CHURCH-YARD; 1802.

PREFACE.

CAST on this globe, without physical powers, and without innate ideas; unable by himself to obey the constitutional laws of his organization, which call him to the first rank in the system of being; MAN can find only in the bosom of society the eminent station that was destined for him in nature, and would be, without the aid of civilization, one of the most feeble and least intelligent of animals;-a truth which, although it has often been insisted upon, has not as yet been rigorously demonstrated. Those philosophers who have laid down the principles upon which it is founded; those who have afterwards supported and propagated it, have given, as a proof of it, the physical and moral state of some wandering tribes, whom they have regarded as not civilized at all, merely because they were not civilized in our particular manner: to these they had recourse, in order to become acquainted with the features of man in the pure state of nature. It is not, however, in these circumstances that we are to seek and study it. In the savage horde the most vagabond, as well as in the most civilized nations of Europe, man is only what he is made to be by his external circumstances; he is necessarily elevated by his equals; he contracts from them his habits and his wants; his ideas arc no longer his own; he enjoys, from the enviable prerogative of his species, a capacity of developing his understanding by the power of imitation, and the influence of society.

We ought, then, to seek elsewhere the model of a man truly savage, of him who owes nothing to his equals; and to form our opinion of him from the particular histories of a small number of individuals, who, during the course of the seventeenth century, and at the beginning of the eighteenth, have been found, at different intervals, living in a state of solitude among the woods, where they had been abandoned at the most tender age[footnote: Linnaeus makes the number amount to ten, and exhibits them as forming a variety of the human species. (Systeme de la Nature.). But such was at these times the tardy progress of science, the students of which were devoted to theory and uncertain hypothesis, and to the exclusive labour of the closet, that actual observation was reckoned of no value; and these interesting facts tended little towards improving the natural history of man. Every thing that has been left of them by contemporary authors, is confined to some insignificant details, the most striking and general result of which is, that these individuals were not susceptible of any decidedly marked improvement; evidently for this reason, because to them was applied, without the slightest regard to the difference of their organs, the ordinary system of education. If this mode of instruction proved completely successful with the savage girl found in France towards the beginning of the last century, the reason is, that having lived in the woods with a companion, she was indebted already to this simple association for a certain development of her intellectual faculties. This was, in fact, an education such as Condillac [footnote: Essai sur l'origine des connaissances humaines, IIe partie, Sect. Ire.] speaks of, when he supposes two children abandoned in a profound solitude, in whose case the sole influence of their cohabitation must give scope to the exercise of their memory and their imagination, and induce them to create a small number of artificial signs. It is an ingenious supposition; which is amply justified by the history of this same girl, whose memory was so far developed as to retrace various circumstances of her residence in the woods, and in the most minute manner, especially the violent death of her female companion [footnote: This girl was caught in the year 1731, in the environs of Chalons-sur-Marne, and educated in a convent, under the name of Mademoiselle Leblanc. She related, as soon as she was able to speak, that she had lived in the woods with a companion, and that she had unfortunately killed her by a violent blow on the head one day, when, upon finding a chaplet under their feet, they disputed about the exclusive possession of it. Racine Poeme de Religion. This history, although it be very circumstantial, is nevertheless so ill told, that if one were to deduce from it, in the first place, what is insignificant, and, in the next, what is incredible, it presents only a very small number of particulars deserving notice; the most remarkable of which is the faculty which this young savage possessed, of recalling to her memory the circumstances of her previous condition.].