Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 25.djvu/120

112 without method and with a kind of crude harmony. In this he found great enjoyment, often leaning back in his chair and laughing heartily at some unexpected combination of sounds. In the warm weather he employed a musical instrument of grand proportions, for he used the whole side of a long, old-fashioned barn, rubbing the blocks up and down as high as he could reach, the different boards giving forth somewhat different sounds as he rubbed his blocks over them. In a crude way he seemed to play upon the different boards, as an organist touches the different keys of his instrument. After years of this kind of musical performance, the boards on the side of the barn were worn quite thin.

He would never use or touch, if he could help it, any sharp-edged tool, being afraid of them as of some animal that might sting or bite. He was a hearty eater, and while eating would frequently stop and make the peculiar grunt characteristic of the hog while eating, then turning his head a little would seem to listen, and then go on eating.

Was this man a case of arrested development? Looked at in one way, he appeared so. The great length of the body, the short lower limbs, the forward stoop, the arms hanging far forward, the voracious eating, the frequent grunt, the animal-like turning of the head and listening while eating—all these things point to arrested development. On the other hand, the excessive development of certain other senses or faculties seems to show how, when certain unfolding powers and organs of the human being are suppressed, the life-forces shoot out and up enormously in other organs and senses; as in a young growing tree, if the top be broken off and most of the main branches lopped away, the sap flows more vigorously into the remaining branches, and they become enormously developed. Thus the common mathematical powers of counting and calculation appeared to be nearly aborted or suppressed, as he was unable to count or solve the simplest arithmetical problem in the common way; yet he solved in an instant mathematical problems that, by what we call our normal mental faculties, required several minutes of careful figuring to find a solution. Blinded and imprisoned where we commonly see and understand, had some of his faculties and powers surpassed the ordinary bounds in a higher and finer development? It appeared so. Was he an idiot? What meant his power of seeing in the dark, of selecting from among a file of hundreds a paper containing a particular article, published a year or more before, though he had never learned to read a sentence as we understand reading? May it not be that the printed page gives impressions of one kind to our common sight and understanding, and of another, finer kind to subtiler senses, and a different, may be a clearer understanding? Thus we trace a man's way by the tracks he makes in the snow or soft ground, while his dog follows him more surely, not by these so palpable signs, but by some finer track or impression, over or within what we see. May it not be that while we