Produced by Malcolm Farmer, Richard J. Shiffer and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net CHAMBERS' EDINBURGH JOURNAL CONDUCTED BY WILLIAM AND ROBERT CHAMBERS, EDITORS OF 'CHAMBERS'S INFORMATION FOR THE PEOPLE,' 'CHAMBERS'S EDUCATIONAL COURSE,' &c. No. 446. NEW SERIES. SATURDAY, JULY 17, 1852. PRICE 1-1/2_d._ WOLF-CHILDREN. It is a pity that the present age is so completely absorbed in materialities, at a time when the facilities are so singularly great for a philosophy which would inquire into the constitution of our moral nature. In the North Pacific, we are in contact with tribes of savages ripening, sensibly to the eye, into civilised communities; and we are able to watch the change as dispassionately as if we were in our studies examining the wonders of the minute creation through a microscope. In America, we have before us a living model, blind, mute, deaf, and without the sense of smell; communicating with the external world by the sense of touch alone; yet endowed with a rare intelligence, which permits us to see, through the fourfold veil that shrouds her, the original germs of the human character.[1] Nearer home, we have been from time to time attracted and astonished by the spectacle of children, born of European parents, emerging from forests where they had been lost for a series of years, fallen back, not into the moral condition of savages, but of wild beasts, with the sentiments and even the instincts of their kind obliterated for ever. And now we have several cases before us, occurring in India, of the same lapses from humanity, involving circumstances curious in themselves, but more important than curious, as throwing a strange light upon what before was an impenetrable mystery. It is to these we mean to direct our attention on the present occasion; but before doing so, it will be well just to glance at the natural history of the wild children of Europe.[2]