Even the New World has supplied some names to this interesting catalogue. The Mexican poetess, Juana Inez de la Cruz, better known as the “Nun of Mexico,” (1651-95), a marvel of precocious knowledge, learned Latin in twenty lessons, when a mere girl; and quickly became such a proficient as to speak it with ease and fluency. Her acquisitions in general learning were most various and extensive; and when on one occasion, in her seventeenth year, forty learned men of Mexico were invited to dispute with her, she proved a match for each in his own particular department. All these accomplishments, notwithstanding, she had the humility to bury in the obscurity of a convent in Mexico, where she silently devoted herself for twenty-seven years to literature and religion. She died in 1695, leaving behind many works still regarded as classics in the language, which fill no less than three 4to. volumes, and have passed through twelve successive editions in Spain. All, with the exception of two, are on sacred subjects.[251] “Infant Phenomena” of language would supply another curious and fertile topic for inquiry—an inquiry too in a psychological point of view eminently interesting. Many of the great linguists enumerated in this Memoir, Pico of Mirandola, Crichton, Martin del Rio, and several others, owed part of their celebrity to the marvellous precociousness of their gifts. A far larger proportion, however, of those who prematurely displayed this talent, were cut off before it had attained any mature or healthy development. Cancellieri[252] mentions a child named Jacopo Martino,[253] born at Racuno, in the Venetian territory, in 1639, who not only acquired a knowledge of Greek and Hebrew, between the age of three and seven, but made such progress in philosophical science as successfully to maintain a public thesis in philosophy at Rome, when no more than eight years of age.[254] This extraordinary child, however, died of exhaustion in 1649, before he had completed his ninth year. It was the same for Claudio del Valle y Hernandez, a Spanish prodigy, mentioned by the same author. But probably the most extraordinary examples of this psychological phenomenon upon record, occur, by a curious coincidence, almost at the very same date in the commencement of the eighteenth century. Within the three years, from 1719 to 1721, were born in different countries, three children of a precociousness (even though we accept the traditions regarding them with great deductions,) entirely without parallel in history.