Mowgli's Sisters

Wolf-suckled were mythical Romulus and Remus who founded Rome in 753 B.C. In 1940 A.D. from South Africa came a scarcely more credible tale of a black boy reared among baboons (TIME, April 1). Between these doubtful tales are 22 cases of children reared in the wilds by wolves, bears, leopards, etc. to which anthropologists credit some authenticity.* But only one case is open to real scientific study: the wolf-children of Midnapore, whose rescuer described them with camera and diary. World authority on these incarnations of Kipling's Mowgli is Anthropologist Robert Mowry Zingg of the University of Denver, who has taken over the records of the case, will soon publish a book on it. Last week in The Scientific American he presented a brief preview of his material.

In October 1920 the Rev. J. A. L. Singh, an Anglican missionary, was hunting among the pagan jungle tribes of northwest India. At a remote village he heard of a "man-ghost" who lived seven miles away under an old ant hill. Wary of tigers, Singh built a blind near the ant hill, settled down at dusk to watch.

A grown-up wolf (he wrote) came out of one of the holes. This animal was followed by another of the same size and kind. The second was followed by a third, closely followed by two cubs, one after the other. Close after the cubs came . . . a hideous-looking creature--hand, foot and body like a human being. Close at its heels came another awful creature, exactly like the first, but smaller. Their eyes were bright and piercing, unlike human eyes. However, I at once came, to the conclusion that they were human beings. . . .

Two days later Singh and a few natives dug open the wolves' den. They slew the fiercely protective mother wolf, rescued the two waifs who nestled snarling among the wolf cubs. How they got in the den and whence they came were never discovered. Secretly the missionary put the wolf-children, females aged about two and eight, in his orphanage. He kept careful records and pictures of their development.

Before he could make human beings of the waifs, Amala and Kamala, Singh had to break them of their deeply ingrained wolf ways. They had to be tied into bed, tore off clothing as savagely as wolf cubs, dreaded daylight, at night howled eerily as they had with the jungle pack, at ten, one and three o'clock. They lapped milk from a dish in imitation of the orphanage dogs, whose company they preferred to other children's. They craved raw meat, and Kamala was once caught devouring chicken entrails which her sensitive wolf-nose had located in a garbage pail. For months they could not walk upright; their muscles were powerfully developed for loping on all fours.

Humanizing of Kamala, the elder, was hindered by the death of Amala, whose wolf-ways were not so set. But like a dog, Kamala in time came to trust Mrs. Singh, whose hand always fed her. She became "a pathetic little subnormal, but clearly not idiotic, human being." Her accomplishments: a vocabulary of 50 words, interest in clothing (if it was red), ability to run simple errands and play with other children. Kamala died at 17, unmarried.

By rearing two children in a wolf den, fate performed an experiment which the maddest scientist would not dare. But sane Dr. Zingg is pleased with the valuable evidence that:

> Though a baby is a potential human being, its nervous system is so complex that it becomes a human being only through association with other people in its earliest years.

> Since a child learns as much in its first two years as in all the rest of its days, lack of human contact at an early age will forever prevent mastery of speech and the upright gait.

> Yet environment is not everything. A wolf, or even an ape, reared in the Rev. Singh's orphanage would not attain a human personality.

* Around the case of a Hessian wolf-boy, French Philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau wove his romantic theories on the virtues of "natural" man, thus helped to set off the American and French Revolutions. Thereafter stories of wild children became suspect as radical political propaganda.

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