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A Man-Wolf.

 

     Rev. Dr. Butler, the Methodist missionary who established the mission of that church in India in 1856, recently returned to this country. He makes the following statement of a remarkable case:

     In 1859 a British soldier, while bearing a despatch from one magistrate to another in the kingdom of Onde, passed an unfrequented ravine, where he saw a pack of wolves, and with them a human being, evidently one of their company. Immediately turning back he reported the circumstance to the magistrate for whom he was traveling. The latter forthwith mustered a number of Coolies and went to the place. The pack of wolves fled a short distance and sought refuge in a sort of cave or den. Beginning to dig, the party soon discovered the feet of the wild man, and, drawing him forth, succeeded in binding and carrying him to the town. Dr. Butler has seen him often since, and says he is evidently a man, and at the time of his capture apparently about twenty-four years of age.

     The captured creature at first violently resisted the attempt to put clothing upon him, but after a while ceased to tear the garment. He is now kept by a gentleman in the city of Thabje-Vampore, some eight hundred miles west of Calcutta. When first taken he was unwilling to eat anything but raw meat, and has never been able to speak or make any approximation to a knowledge of the alphabet. If any one looks earnestly or sharply at him, he expresses his annoyance by a half uttered grunt, immediately turning away and settling upon his haunches in a corner of the room, or lies down. He eats his food off the ground; and although evidently a human being, is in habits a wolf, with the instincts of that beast.

     This is certainly an anomalous fact in natural history, although it is said that four similar cases are known to have occured in India, presenting the same general facts.

     Wolves abound in India, where the inhabitants live wholly in the cities and villages: and at the approach of night all persons employed in the open country retire to these clusters of houses, or huts, and these roving and ferocious animals find free range. It freqently happens that a wolf steals into a house and carries off a child. So frequently is this case that in the schedules furnished for recording the mortality in each place, one column is headed, “Carried off by wolves.”

     Dr. Butler’s theory of this strange case is that a she wolf probably carried off this person when he was an infant, but that before she devoured her prey, the child instinctively searched for food. Beginning to draw its nourishment, it awoke in the wolf the maternal instinct which led to the preservation of his life, and thus the boy lived and grew.

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