Science: Wolf Girls

From India came a strange tale last week, a new Mowgli* story, a Romulus and Remus anecdote, with the genders changed. Bishop Pakenham Walsh of Calcutta, back in London from a visit to the mission of the Rev. Jal Singh at Midnapur, Bengal, told the tale and vouched for its truth. Some months ago the Rev. Jal Singh was told, by the wide-eyed inhabitants of an isolated village in his parish, to avoid a certain path into the hills. It was, they assured him, haunted by demons. Strong in his faith, and armed against wild beasts, the Rev. Jal Singh proceeded up this path and near it found, not a dragon’s nest, but the den of a she-wolf, with several wolf cubs sprawling in it and two female humans, aged about two and eight years respectively. Exceedingly shy and fierce, these human females went on all fours like their den-mates. They uttered guttural growls and barks like wolves. Only one explanation seemed possible: a native woman, or two native women, had abandoned their babies; the she-wolf had adopted them.

With much difficulty the children were “rescued.” The youngest soon died in captivity. The other was put in the Rev. Jal Singh’s orphanage, where it took months to wean her even slightly from her savage ways. She fiercely tore off the clothes they sewed on her. She bit and clawed when they tried to bathe her. She put her mouth down into her dishes of food, not understanding the use of her hands save as weapons. In time she learned something of their use and acquired a few human words. Weak mentally, she neither laughed nor cried, preferring the company of dogs and other animals to human children.

*Wolf-suckled, snake-taught, elephant-advised hero of Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Books.