TARZAN TO THE LIFE

Wairarapa Times-Age, 21 April 1941, Page 2

TARZAN TO THE LIFE

' MORE BRUTE THAN A BOY. You have read of Tarzan of the Apes, no doubt—the wild creature who was half man, half animal, and you remember Kipling's Mowgli. But they were characters in books. There has never been a wild man to the life, surely?

> There have been many. One came to light only recently, and years ago theie was ishi who stepped out of the Stone Age into the Electric Age. Before all these there was Peter the Wild Boy. He was called the Wild Boy till his death in 1785, when he was believed to have been turned 70. No one knows when or where he was born. All that we know of him in his young days is that he was found in the woods of Hamelin, a- German town about 25 miles from Hanover.

He was more brute than boy. Naked and unashamed, he climbed trees with astonishing swiftness, swung from branch to branch, scuttled off the moment he saw a human being, lived on berries and fruit and the raw flesh of birds and animals, and slept in swaying branches.

Captured at last, he was taken to the court of King George of Hanover, and later to England where he spent the rest of his life on a farm. He was no more than a domestic animal. He could not talk, though he learnt to say Peter and George. When the weather was about to change he cried piteously. He had no use for money. He refused to lie in a bed but preferred to curl up in a corner of a room and sleep on the floor. About five feet high, he was a friendly, rather frightened savage, obedient as a dog, though he more than once ran away —being found in Scotland at one time. He hated wearing clothes, but he loved bright things, and would stroke a piece of glass. This strange creature, a man in form but a beast in mental development, a Tarzan who really did live, but lived only as a farm animal, was long studied by Lord Monboddo who wrote about him in 1782.