Volume 23, Number 14 · September 16, 1976
The Call of the Wild
By Jonathan Miller
The Wild Boy of Aveyron
by Harlan Lane
Harvard University Press, 351 pp., $15.00
In the fifth year of the new Republic a group of peasants in a small rural district of southwestern France reported that they had seen a naked youth scampering through the woods apparently searching for acorns and roots. After a series of captures and escapes the child was finally secured and referred to a local orphanage, on the written understanding that his peculiar case deserved the attention of an expert. By this time the mute, ferocious child had attracted great interest among the local intelligentsia and for the next month there was a heated dispute over who should take charge of him. On January 29, 1800, the director of the orphanage, who had already completed a long preliminary account of the child's appearance and behavior, received the following official letter from Paris.
Review, 3535 words
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