Wolf! Wolf!

by BERGEN EVANS

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AN interesting footnote to folk zoology is supplied by stories of children being reared by animals, stories that have been repeated among all peoples at all times. And it is not without significance that this myth has reappeared in our own times and has been given wider credence, under more dignified auspices, than ever before in its long history.

Many legendary heroes were reared by animals. Zeus and Tarzan both had the benefit of such an association, and history is spotted with lesser figures who derive their whole importance from their feral foster mothers. Ireland had a sheep boy, and at Salzburg there was a swine girl who ate acorns and sat cross-legged in a sty, to the admiration of all beholders. A fishwoman with “sea-mosse that did stick about her” was washed through the dikes at Edam in 1403, and lived for the next seventeen years in Haarlem, where she “learned to spinne and perform other pettie offices of women” though she was never able to master Dutch. She adored the cross and so impressed the local clergy that more than forty of them are said to have testified to her authenticity.

There seems to be something about these unhappy beings, in fact, that leads divines to vouch for them. Thus it is on the authority of Archbishop Malheson of Winnipeg that Ernest Thompson Seton tells the “true story” of little Harry Service’s being adopted by a badger. In this instance, it is pleasant to relate, there was a reciprocation of unnatural affection and the badger herself was adopted by Harry’s family, though it proved a trial, for an unfortunate rivalry for the boy’s love developed between his real and foster mothers.

A more recent adoptee was Lukas, the baboon boy of South Africa, sponsored in the American Journal of Psychology (January, 1040) by Dr. Foley, and in the American Weekly (May 18, 1941) by Professor R. M. Zingg, of the Universiiy of Denver, whose unselfish devotion to his protégé threatened, for a time, to wrest from Lord Monboddo the honor of being “the baboon’s gen’rous friend.” Unlike the fishwoman, Lukas could speak Dutch, or at least Afrikaans, and in the guttural accents of that harsh tongue furnished eager scientists with a detailed account of his simian sojourn. What’s more, if attention seemed to flag, he would exhibit the sear where an ostrich had kicked him, or eat a cactus. He could eat a tremendous number of cactuses, eighty-nine at a sitting the excited savants said, an ability that was regarded as absolute corroboration of his story. In 1937 his supremacy — and his cash value as a unique exhibit — was challenged by Ndola, a rival baboon boy, but Ndola was exposed, in the American Journal of Psychology, as merely “a case of neglected paralysis provoking the quadrupedal posture” and Lukas had the learned journals to himself again.

But not for long. Seven months after Ndola’s exposure Lukas himself “fell with hideous ruin and combustion down.” It came out that he had not lived with baboons at all — had, in fact, been doing time in the Burghersdorp jail at the moment he was said to have been discovered among his bluebottomed siblings.

The trouble was that his alleged discoverer was a policeman and hence subject to discipline for perjury. Upon investigation by the Commissioner of Police the story turned out to be hearsay from a dead man, and after the Commissioner’s businesslike report the whole sorry train of professors began to turn and belabor each other. Not, of course, without academic dignity. Dr. Foley’s authentication of Lukas, said Professor Zingg, had been “accurate for the time it was written.” Its “precipitous” publication had been due to the “generous policy” of Dr. Raymond A. Dart, of Johannesburg, who had nobly shared his findings with other seekers at all stages of the investigation. And this particular stage happened to be the “premature” stage.

In the general excitement attendant upon the discovery of the imposture, Professor Zingg obviously was unable to inform all his correspondents; for almost a year after this stately recantation, the story was published again, as on his authority, in the American Weekly. And in 1944, though by then well enough established to need no sponsor, Lukas was again cavorting through the pages of that publication.

The true Lukas, by the way, — but he alone, — was placed in an institution for the feeble-minded.

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Lukas’s withdrawal, however, to “the vast edges drear and naked shingles” of the journalistic world did not leave the somewhat more literate papers wholly barren. There was almost always some animal-adopted child to be presented and discussed in their columns. In 1926 a boy had been rescued from wolves near Miawanna, seventy-five miles from Allahabad. He barked at night, ate grass, and propelled himself along the ground in the manner of a dog with worms, and he was said “to display certain instincts even lower than those of his alleged foster parents,” though just what these were was never made clear, delicacy, no doubt, forbidding.

The New York Times, in more than a column devoted to the problems which this boy’s rescue had raised, was of the opinion that he was authentic. “Some of the best known medical men in London" had been skeptical, but an equal number of “Old Indian Army Officers” had silenced them by asserting that wolf children were quite common in India. Kipling, as the creator of “wolf-suckled, snaketaught, elephant-advised Mowgli,” was naturally sought out for an opinion. He emphatically supported the Old Army Officers, though he doubted that the boy went, as described, on his hands and knees. He thought it more likely that he went on “knees and elbows.”

Concern was expressed lest wolf mothers might neglect the religious training of such children as they might adopt, but it was allayed by the Reverend M. McCleah, then vicar of St. John’s at Hallington, in Sussex, who in 1897 had conducted the funeral services for a wolf boy who had been captured at Sikandra thirty years before. Certain elements in this lad’s deportment had indeed, for a long time, suggested that wolf parents were not desirable from a moral standpoint. But Mr. McCleah was able to assure the troubled that the boy’s basic moral fiber had not been damaged, since, just before he died, he had “closed his eyes and pointed towards the skies” in a manner that made full amends for his previous impiety.

Among the letters to the editor which the story of the Miawanna boy evoked were protests against the cruelty of taking these children from their foster mothers. But, so far as is known, nothing was done. Action may well have been frustrated by a jurisdictional dispute between the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children and the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.

But the story of animal adoptions that reduces all the others to insignificance is that of the “wolfreared waifs of Midnapore” which made its first fulldress appearance in Harper’s Magazine for January, 1941. This was not its first time in print, however. It had been run in the Westminster Gazette and had been reprinted in the New York Times as early as 1926. It had played peek-a-boo in various learned publications for a dozen years, and in 1939 it had filled a spread in the American Weekly, illustrated with those vivid sketches by which that lively journal seeks to assist such of its subscribers as find reading difficult. But the sponsorship of Harper’s and the renown of its new narrator, Dr. Arnold Gesell, Director of the Yale Clinic of Child Development, raised it to a new dignity, while the singular style in which it was presented gave it an added grace and freshness.

Dr. Gesell’s narrative can be briefly summarized. In the autumn of 1912, he says, an Indian she-wolf, “her teats . . . gorged, her eyes . . . preternaturally mild,” and her whole being “warmed by the chemistry of maternal hormones,” adopted a Hindu baby girl. Nourished by “mammalian” milk (which Dr. Gesell asserts is “chemically very like” other milk), the child made “a remarkably effective adaptation to wolf mores.” It was not easy: “Furniture there was none.” “Books, rugs , . . dishes” and “true table manners” were “conspicuously lacking.”

But the little girl overcame all obstacles and made “a successful adjustment to the onerous demands of the wolf den.”She got on without furniture and books, slept on the floor, ate directly with her mouth, politely overlooked the lack of good manners, and “rubbed her haunches over the ground for cleanliness.” She developed “a deep and mysterious sense of community with the pack,” — a “palship” Dr. Gesell would call it, — scrambled after them on their forays, became adept at shooing buzzards off a dead hog, and added her treble wail to that “weird nocturne” which every night, at ten, one, and three, the wolves sent up to the shivering stars.

Her physical adaptation to what Dr. Gesell calls “wolverine culture” was, in some ways, more remarkable still. Her spine modified to suit “bipatellar locomotion,” a glow “emanated” from her eyes at night, her canine teeth grew long and pointed, and she ceased to perspire, tending rather “to pant and to extrude her tongue in the sun.”

In 1919, “of all unpredictable wonders,” the mother wolf adopted another child, also a girl. In 1920 the wolf was killed and the children, now doubly orphaned, were placed in the care of the Reverend J. A. L. Singh, of Midnapore, who discreetly kept their history a secret for six years lest it should “prejudice their chances of marriage.” One would have thought that the younger girl’s death and the older girl’s strange habits would, in themselves, have been sufficient to discourage the most ardent suitor, but the good man’s solicitude is, nonetheless, touching.

The death of the younger child occurred in 1921, but the older, who had been named Kamala, lived until 1929, slowly readapting herself to human ways. She continued the “traditional wolf howl” at ten, one, and three, but a human note was observed in 1922 when she addressed Mrs. Singh as “Ma.” In time she “toileted in the bathroom,” to use Dr. Gesell’s phrase, though this must have been one of her latest accomplishments, for in 1926 the Reverend Mr. Singh, in a letter to Paul C. Squires, stated that she didn’t, and from the general gloom of his statement we are led to suspect that she continued her strenuous abstersions. By 1927 she had “so far transcended wolf ways” as to be regular and devout in church attendance, in which she showed marked superiority to the Sikandra boy who had interrupted divine service by shouting “Dham, dham!” — a proceeding which Dr. Gesell says indicated “a low idiot plateau of mentality.”

By 1927 also “her behavior had become conventional” and she talked “with the full sense of the words used.” But this advantage over her biographers was not long maintained, for she was taken ill “and gave up the ghost on the 14th morning at 4 A.M. in the month of November, 1929.”

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FOR his detailed account of life in the den, Dr. Gesell confessed that he drew heavily upon “imagination and . . . conjectures.” For his information about the later years in the orphanage he acknowledged his indebtedness to a “diary record” kept by ihe Reverend Mr. Singh and entrusted by him for publication to Professor Zingg, who, despite Lukas’s defalcation, continued a friend to feral man.

While this more scholarly work was in preparation, however, Dr. Gesell soothed the impatience of the public by publishing Wolf Child and Human Child, a fuller account of the episode, embellished with some retouched snapshots, a pen drawing of “the mother wolf,” and “a quaint woodcut” of Romulus and Remus which he was forced to use, he admits, for lack of a suitable photograph. This volume added no new information, though a discussion entitled “Can Wolf Ways Be Humanized?" was not without interest. Time, no shunner of issues, which had taken up the wolf children with its customary vigor, answered definitely that they could not: “A wolf, or even an ape,” the editors stoutly maintained, “reared in the Rev. Singh’s orphanage would not attain a human personality.”

The facts upon which this ringing enunciation was based were drawn (like Dr. Gesell’s narrative, and the Scientific American’s, Coronet’s, the American Weekly’s, and the Saturday Home Magazine’s — for the story had wide circulation) from the Reverend Mr. Singh’s diary and from the interpretation put upon it, in various learned articles, by Professor Zingg. Dr. Gesell was sure that Professor Zingg had “carefully checked the essential authenticity” of the whole business; but “carefully checked,” like “wolverine,”must have had here some meaning not commonly attributed to it; for Professor Zingg had said, only a few months before, that he had “unfortunately been unable to get in touch with scientists in India to check and recheck the cases.”

He had, however, he hastened to add, talked with at least two people who had traveled in India, one of whom referred him to the Illustrated Weekly of India for an account of another wolf child “exhibited at the Gwalior Baby Week,”and later, when under fire, he insisted that he had spent three years “checking through voluminous correspondence with numerous persons.” This activity, apparently, left no time for consulting an atlas, for he seems to have been under the impression that Midnapore was among “the tiger-infested Jungles of north-west India”; whereas Dr. Gesell, who, it would seem, doubted the “essential authenticity” of at least that fact, strung along with Rand McNally and located it seventy miles southwest of Calcutta.

Before the diary could be published, however, skepticism, with “extraordinary license,” had reared its ugly head. It was felt necessary to silence “irresponsible” doubters once and for all. To this end the diary, when it finally appeared in 1942, was prefaced with a formidable battery of testimonials. Unfortunately for their effect upon the skeptic, none of them happened to be by any of that “good number of men . . . of a sportive nature” in whose company the Reverend Mr. Singh went to preach the gospel and professed to have first seen the children living as wolves among wolves. Professor Zingg says boldly that five such persons “are on record,”but he fails to make it clear that the record is the Reverend Mr. Singh’s record, no one else’s, and that it consists entirely of the Reverend Mr. Singh’s say-so. That at least one of the five could not have been included among the “numerous persons” addicted to “voluminous correspondence” is regrettable.

In their place, however, Professor Zingg offered five character witnesses for the Reverend Mr. Singh — three professors, a judge, and a bishop.

Of these the professors did not profess to have seen either the Reverend Mr. Singh or his wolf children, so that the only characters illuminated by their testimony were their own. The judge, a resident of Midnapore, testified that he believed the story and that he had actually “spoken to several people who saw the elder of the two girls” while she was living at the orphanage.

The brunt of affirmation was thus thrown upon the bishop, the Right Reverend H. Packenham-Walsh, who definitely stated that he saw the elder of the two girls four years after her rescue. He does not claim to have been personally acquainted with the mother wolf; yet he is able to assure us that she was “well pleased with her experiment.” From his examination of the child he concluded that wolves have “no sense of humor" and “no interest except in raw meat.”He was happy, though, to be able to announce that the wolf parents had not taught their charges “anything bad,”a fact which he felt has “a very pertinent bearing on the consideration of what we mean by ’Original Sin.'”

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FASCINATING as such reflections are, however, the severe logician must dismiss them as irrelevant. Professor Zingg’s correspondents, Professor Gesell’s prose, the judge’s affidavit, the bishop’s meditations, and the attending physician’s uroscopy of the dying Kamala have all an interest, even a charm, of their own; but they add nothing whatever to prove that the children were adopted and reared by wolves.

For that our sole evidence is that “diary of observation" which we are innocently told in a foreword “was nearing completion" in 1933, though the second child had died in 1929; and this diary, for all the eager promises of “internal evidence,”fails to carry conviction. Though it professes to be a day-by-day record of the children’s discovery among the wolves and their subsequent behavior at the orphanage, it is, actually, a meager collection of entries, few and irregular, not arranged chronologically, and interspersed with reflections concerning the “divine" nature of the event that are, to say the least, unscientific. And the “proof is further vitiated by the fact that the Reverend Mr. Singh was convinced that the children were wolf children even before he unearthed them.

That he reared a strange child in his orphanage is as incontestable as that he was, probably, the worst photographer that ever lived. That he found the child in the woods in the vicinity of wolves is at least possible, though that great scientific authority, the Illustrated Weekly of India, says that there are no wolves in this particular region. Furthermore, there are discrepancies in his earlier and later accounts of the finding, and his failure to secure testimonials from those who, he says, were with him at the time, while going to such trouble to get testimonials from others, adds to the growing doubt.

Of course, even if he had found the children. exactly as he said he did, living in an ant mound from which wolves had been seen to run, it would not have been positive proof that they had been reared by those or any other wolves. They may have fled into the den in fear. Or they may even have lived there independently. It would have been a strange situation, but not nearly so strange as the one alleged. That they curled up in a ball, which is thought, for some reason, to be irrefutable proof of their previous lupinity, merely proves that their backbones were flexible. It is not an uncommon condition in children and may be observed — as Dr. Gesell ought to know — in scores of nurseries that have known no other wolf than Red Riding Hood’s.

But the most damning point of all, the thing that makes the whole story untenable, is the effort — which occupies the major portions of all versions to show that the children must have been reared by wolves because they later behaved like wolves. But the wolves they behaved like were not ordinary, four-footed wolves, or even a particular species of ordinary wolves, Canis pallipes (for Dr. Gesell is very learned on this detail), but were genuine funnypaper wolves, Lupus vulgus fantasticus, running in packs, howling by the clock, and emitting a “weird light" from their eyes.

Such is the basis for what Harper & Brothers regards as an “important and absorbing human study" and which “testifies anew,” in the opinion of one of the highest-paid savants of Yale University, “to the stamina of the human spirit.”Another artless pundit, crying that the story served admirably “to introduce us to some of the basic matters with which sociology deals,”— as, no doubt, it does, — proceeded in haste to revise his textbook, building the whole fabric of his new thought upon these shifty sands. Others followed suit until, today, the waifs, like God, would have to be invented if they did not exist — they serve so many purposes. Half a dozen college textbooks have been rewritten to include them as “authenticated" facts. Two complete volumes have been written about them. And practically every leading journal and news organ has had an article on them. But the veracity of the narrative has never been questioned.

Sometimes one wonders why any self-respecting wolf would want to adopt a human being.