Naturally the fame of the boy spread abroad, and with its spreading his father came in for some sharp criticism. Formerly he had been laughed at as a man who was essaying the impossible in striving to impart intelligence to a mentally subnormal child. Now that he had succeeded so well in his undertaking people asserted that he was fanatically endeavouring to convert the child into a weird thinking machine, and endangering his health and sanity. Precisely the same objections, in short, were raised to his educational experiment that were later raised in the case of the Thomson boys and John Stuart Mill, and that have recently been raised against the educational methods of the fathers of the three youths now in Harvard. All kinds of absurd stories were circulated regarding Karl. He was pictured quite generally as a pale, anæmic, puny, goggle-eyed “freak,” who had missed the delights of childhood and was vastly to be pitied. In reality, he was a happy, joyous youngster, who got as much “fun” out of life as any boy could. This is the unanimous testimony of those who “investigated” the lad for themselves. Thus the archæologist Heyne, in a statement to his friend the famous philosopher and poet Wieland, frankly admitted: “I allowed myself to be persuaded to examine young Witte, in order to be able to form my own opinion of him. I found the boy in body and mind happy and hale to a greater degree than I had expected. I found, in testing him with Homer and Virgil, that he had sufficient knowledge of words and things to translate readily and strike the right meaning, and that, without exact grammatical and lingual knowledge, he was able to guess correctly the meaning of a passage from its context. What was most remarkable to me was that he read with understanding, feeling, and effect. “Otherwise I found in him no preponderating faculty. Memory, imagination, reasoning, were about in equilibrium. In other matters besides those that had been inculcated by education, I found him a happy, lusty boy, not even averse from mischief, which was to me a quieting thing.” At the same time that he was thus instructing Karl in languages and literature, Witte sought to awaken in him a love of art and science. Neither artist nor scientist himself, he none the less believed that if he could only interest his son sufficiently in artistic and scientific subjects, he would study them enthusiastically. To this end he adopted a plan which might well be imitated by all parents.