One night, when the wild boy was lying asleep under his tree, Janoo saw two wolves come up stealthily, and smell at him. They touched him, and he awoke; and rising from his reclining posture, he put his hands upon the heads of his visitors, and they licked his face. They capered round him, and he threw straw and leaves at them. The khidmutgar gave up his protégé for lost; but presently he became convinced that they were only at play, and he kept quiet. He at length gained confidence enough to drive the wolves away; but they soon came back, and resumed their sport for a time. The next night, three playfellows made their appearance, and in a few nights after, four. They came four or five times, till Janoo lost all his fear of them. When the Cashmere merchant returned to Lucknow, where his establishment was, Janoo still carried his pet with him, tied by a string to his own arm; and, to make him useful according to his capacity, with a bundle on his head. At every jungle they passed, however, the boy would throw down the bundle, and attempt to dart into the thicket; repeating the insubordination, though repeatedly beaten for it, till he was fairly subdued, and became docile by degrees. The greatest difficulty was to get him to wear clothes, which to the last he often injured or destroyed, by rubbing them against posts like a beast, when some part of his body itched. Some months after their arrival at Lucknow, Janoo was sent away from the place for a day or two on some business, and on his return he found that the wild boy had escaped. He was never more seen.
It is a curious circumstance, that the wild children, whether of Europe or Asia, have never been found above a certain age. They do not grow into adults in the woods. Colonel Sleeman thinks their lives may be cut short by their living exclusively on animal food; but to some of them, as we have seen, a vegetable diet has been habitual. The probability seems to be, that with increasing years, their added boldness and consciousness of strength may lead them into fatal adventures with their brethren of the forest. As for the protection of the animal by which they were originally nurtured becoming powerless from age, which is another hypothesis, that supposes too romantic a system of patronage and dependence. The head of the family must have several successive series of descendants to care for after the arrival of the stranger, and it is far more probable that the wild boy is obliged to turn out with his playmates, when they are ordered to shift for themselves, than that he alone remains a fixture at home. That protection of some kind at first is a necessary condition of his surviving at all, there can be no manner of doubt, although it does not follow that a wolf is always the patron. The different habits of some of the European children we have mentioned, shew a totally different course of education. If, for instance, they had been nurtured by wolves, they would no more have learned to climb trees than to fly in the air. As for the female specimen we have mentioned, hers was obviously an exceptional case. She was lost, as appeared from her own statement, when old enough to work at some employment, and a club she used as a weapon was one of her earliest recollections.
The wild children of India, however, were obviously indebted to wolves for their miserable lives; and it is not so difficult as at first sight might be supposed, to imagine the possibility of such an occurrence. The parent wolves are so careful of their progeny, that they feed them for some time with half-digested food, disgorged by themselves; and after that—if we may believe Buffon, who seems as familiar with the interior of a den as if he had boarded and lodged in the family—they bring home to them live animals, such as hares and rabbits. These the young wolves play with, and when at length they are hungry, kill: the mother then for the first time interfering, to divide the prey in equal portions. But in the case of a child being brought to the den—a child accustomed, in all probability, to tyrannise over the whelps of pariah dogs and other young animals, they would find it far easier to play than to kill; and if we only suppose the whole family going to sleep together, and the parents bringing home fresh food in the morning—contingencies not highly improbable—the mystery is solved, although the marvel remains. It may be added, that such wolves as we have an opportunity of observing in menageries, are always gentle and playful when young, and it is only time that develops the latent ferocity of a character the most detestable, perhaps, in the whole animal kingdom. Cowardly and cruel in equal proportion, the wolf has no defenders. 'In short,' says Goldsmith—probably translating Buffon, for we have not the latter at hand to ascertain—'every way offensive, a savage aspect, a frightful howl, an insupportable odour, a perverse disposition, fierce habits, he is hateful while living, and useless when dead.'
But what, then, is man, whom mere accidental association for a few years can strip of the faculties inherent in his race and convert into a wolf? The lower animals retain their instincts in all circumstances. The kitten, brought up from birth on its mistress's lap, imbibes none of her tastes in food or anything else. It rejects vegetables, sweets, fruits, all drinks but water or milk, and although content to satisfy its hunger with dressed meat, darts with an eager growl upon raw flesh. Man alone is the creature of imitation in good or in bad. His faculties and instincts, although containing the germ of everything noble, are not independent and self-existing like those of the brutes. This fact accounts for the difference observable, in an almost stereotyped form, in the different classes of society; it affords a hint to legislators touching their obligation to use the power they possess in elevating, by means of education, the character of the more degraded portions of the community; and it brings home to us all the great lesson of sympathy for the bad as well as the afflicted—both victims alike of circumstances, over which they in many cases have nearly as little control as the wild children of the desert.
THE LITERATURE OF PARLIAMENT
The Imperial Parliament of Great Britain and Ireland, in addition to its other varied and important functions, fulfils, through one of its branches, that of a great national book manufactory. Every session, the House of Commons issues a whole library of valuable works, containing information of the most ample and searching kind on subjects of a very miscellaneous character. These are the Blue-books, of which everybody has heard: many jokes are extant as to their imposing bulk and great weight, literally and figuratively; and a generation eminently addicted to light reading, may well look with horror on these thick and closely-printed folios. But, in truth, they are not for the mere reader: they are for the historian, and student of any given subject; they are storehouses of material, not digested treatises. True it is, that their great size sometimes defeats its object—the valuable portion of the material is sometimes buried under the comparatively worthless heap that surrounds it—the golden grains lost amid the chaff. But in a case of this kind, the error of redundancy is one on the safe side; let a subject in all its bearings be thoroughly and fully brought up, and it is the fault or failing of him who sets about the study of it, if he is appalled at the amount of information on which he has to work, or cannot discriminate and seize upon the salient points, or on those which are necessary for his own special purposes.
Few persons, we believe, who have not had occasion to consult these parliamentary volumes in a systematic manner, are at all aware of the immense labour that is bestowed upon them, and the care and completeness with which they are compiled and arranged. Indeed, we daresay few readers have any accurate notions of the actual number of parliamentary papers annually issued, or of the nature of their contents. From even a very cursory examination of the literary result of a parliamentary session, the previously uninformed investigator could not fail to rise with a greatly augmented estimate of the functions of the great ruling body of the state—the guarding and directing power in the multitudinous affairs of the British Empire—an empire that extends over every possible variety of country and climate, and includes under its powerful, yet mild and beneficent sway, tribes of every colour of skin, and of every shade of religious belief. Such a survey, in fact, tends to impress one more fully and immediately than could well be fancied, with the magnitude of the business of the British legislature, and the consequent weighty responsibilities imposed upon its members. But, great as the burden is, it is distributed over so many shoulders, that it appears to press heavily, and really does so, only on a few who support it at the more trying points.
The session 1851 is the latest of whose labours, as they appear in the form of parliamentary records, an account can be given. By the admirable system of arrangement we have referred to, each parliamentary 'paper,' whether it issues in the shape of a bulky Blue-book—that is to say, as a thick, stitched folio volume, in a dark-blue cover—or as a mere 'paper'—an uncovered folio of a single sheet of two or four pages, or several stitched together, but not attaining the dignity of the blue cover—is marked as belonging to a certain class; and when the issue of the session is complete, a full set of 'Titles, Contents, and Indexes' to the whole is supplied, so that they can all be classified and bound up in due order with the utmost ease and celerity. The Titles, Contents, and Indexes to the Sessional Printed Papers of Session 1851 are at present before us, in the shape of a folio Blue-book about an inch and a half thick, from which we think we may pick some facts of interest.
It must be premised, that the session 1851 was considered by politicians a peculiarly barren and unfruitful one, as the Great Exhibition, in conjunction with ministerial difficulties, and the monster debates on the Ecclesiastical Titles' Bill, tended greatly to impede the ordinary business of the Houses, and gave an air of tedium and languor to the whole proceedings. Nevertheless, the papers for the year amount to no less than sixty volumes! Of these, the first six contain Public Bills. A bill, as most of our readers must be aware, is a measure submitted to the consideration of parliament with the view of its being adopted into the legal code of the country, for which it must receive the sanction of both Houses and the assent of the crown. When a bill has 'passed' through the Lords and Commons, and received the royal assent, it becomes an 'act'—that is, a law. A bill, in passing through the Houses, is subjected to numerous amendments and alterations in form, and is often printed, for the use of members and other parties interested, three or four times after such alterations, before it comes forth in its final and permanent form as an act. Thus, the famous Ecclesiastical Titles' Bill is to be found in three several shapes among the bills before it reappears for the fourth time as an act. Again, the word 'public' prefixed to these six volumes of bills, reminds us of the vast amount of business that comes before parliament and its committees in the shape of 'private' bills, of which no record appears here. These are bills of special and individual application, such as when a public company seeks an act of incorporation, the possessor of an entailed estate desires to sell a portion of ground, a railway directory asks for powers of various kinds, and so on.
An examination of the contents of these six volumes would shew how many and diverse are the subjects that turn up in parliament in the course of a single and brief session; but to enter on it satisfactorily would require a great amount of space, and might, after all, be more tedious than profitable. A glance at those actually passed may suffice. These were 106 in number: the first is, 'An Act to amend the Passengers' Act of 1849;' and the hundred and sixth, 'An Act to appoint Commissioners to inquire into the Existence of Bribery in St Albans.' Besides the acts of an ordinary or routine character, we find the following among the subjects legislated on:—The Marine Forces, Leases for Mills in Ireland, Protection of Original Designs, the Protection of Servants and Apprentices, the Sale of Arsenic, Highways in Wales, Sites for Schools, Herring-Fishery, Prisons in Scotland, Common Lodging-Houses, Window and House Duties, Marriages in India, Ecclesiastical Titles, Smithfield Market, Settlement of the Boundaries of Canada and New Brunswick, Highland Roads and Bridges, Gunpowder Magazine at Liverpool, Management of the Insane in India, Lands in New Zealand, Representative Peers of Scotland, Emigration, Law of Evidence, Criminal Justice, &c.
1
See 'The Rudimental,' in No. 391.
2
A paper on this subject will be found in Chambers's Miscellany of Useful and Entertaining Tracts, vol. v. No. 48.
3
See 'Gang-Robbers of India,' in Nos. 360 and 361 of this Journal. The title of the pamphlet alluded to is, An Account of Wolves nurturing Children in their Dens. By an Indian Official. Plymouth: Jenkin Thomas, printer. 1852.