Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 50.djvu/253

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This court fool could say bright things on occasion, but his main use to the ladies and lords of the palace was to serve as victim to practical jokes, cruel, coarse, and vulgar enough to be appreciated perhaps in the Bowery.

Any quick-witted imbecile or feeble-minded individual in those days had no difficulty in securing a good livelihood, and sometimes even prosperity and fame. Under such conditions it became common for normal individuals to adopt the calling of the jester or buffoon, and these were known as artificial fools.

—The aptitudes of various kinds described above as not infrequently encountered in idiots are all of rather low order. They are never found in any but the congenitally defective, who usually present the stigmata of degeneration. They consist chiefly of great powers of memory, visual or auditory, and of facility in imitation. There is no spontaneous invention. The idiots savants are mere copyists in music, modeling, designing, or painting; yet at the same time their talents stand out in strong contrast to their general feeble-mindedness. As a rule, the aptitudes are precociously developed, and are frequently lost before reaching adult life. The physical basis of such talents must be a precocious perfection of the cerebral organization in certain areas, together with a true hyperplasia of tissue in such regions and a tendency to early degeneration. There must be an increased number of cellular elements and sensori-motor combinations and associations in definite parts of the brain. Cases have been described in cerebral pathology of misplaced aggregations of such tissues in the brain under the name of heterotopia of gray matter, and it is possible that some such unequal distribution of the