Digitized by the Internet Archive 
 
 in 2007 with funding from 
 
 IVIicrosoft Corporation 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/casperhauseraccoOOfeuerich 
 
^1 
 
 OF THB 
 
 [UNIVEES 
 
 ITY^ 
 
SiL^iPiEim jKAW^HIEc 
 
CASPAR HAUSER, 
 
 ACCOUNT 
 
 OF AN INDIVIDUAL KEPT IN A DUNGEON, SEPARATED 
 
 FROM ALL COMMUNICATION WITH THE WORLD, 
 
 FROM EARLY CHILDHOOD TO ABOUT THE 
 
 AGE OF SEVENTEEN. 
 
 DRAWN UP FROM LEGAL DOCUMENTS. 
 
 BY ANSELM VON FEUERBACH, 
 President of one of the Bavarian Courts of Appeal, &c. 
 
 Righteous Heaven, who has permitted 
 All this wo: what fatal crime, 
 Was by me', e'en at the time 
 Of my hapless birth, committed. 
 
 -.^ SiGISMUWD. 
 
 i^^"!^^ j'^ QaXitron's Life, a Dream, 
 
 ^i fSCOND EDITIOi*. 
 
 BOSTON: 
 ALLEN AND TICKNOR. 
 
 1833. 
 
,0^ 
 
 ^K^A 
 
 Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1832, 
 
 By Allen and Ticknor, 
 
 In the Clerk's office of tiie District Court of 
 
 Ma^sacliusetts. 
 
 I. R. BUTTS, SCHOOL STREET. 
 
DEDICATION. 
 
 TO HIS LORDSHIP, THE EARL OF STANHOPE, 
 
 Peer of Great Britain, Sec. 
 
 To no one could this dedication have been 
 addressed with greater propriety than to your 
 Lordship ; in whose person, Providence has 
 appointed to the youth, without childhood and 
 boyhood, a paternal friend and powerful protec- 
 tor. Beyond the sea, in fair old England, you 
 have prepared for him a secure retreat, until 
 the rising sun of truth shall have dispersed the 
 darkness which still hangs over his mysterious 
 fate ; perhaps, in the remainder of his half 
 murdered life, he may yet hope for days, for 
 the sake of which, he will no longer regret 
 his having seen the light of this world. For 
 such a deed, none but the genius of humanity 
 can recompense you. 
 
 In the vast desert of the present times, when 
 a2 
 
IT 
 
 the hearts of individuals are more and more 
 shrivelled and parched by the fires of selfish 
 passions, to have met once more with a real 
 man, is one of the most pleasing and indelibly 
 impressive occurrences which have adorned 
 the evening scenery of my life. 
 
 With inmost veneration and love, I am, 
 your Lordship's most obedient servant, 
 VON FEUERBACH. 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 In offering the following pages to the pub- 
 lic, it will be necessary to say but a very few 
 words on the subject of them, or of their distin- 
 guished German author and the American 
 translator, in order to show the peculiar 
 claims, which they have to the attention of the 
 reader. Caspar Hauser, the subject of this 
 work, is the individual of whom many per- 
 sons will recollect to have seen, some years 
 ago, an account in the papers of the day. 
 He was then represented as having been 
 found in Nuremberg in a state, which 
 threw the greatest mystery over his pre- 
 vious life. Hauser was at that time, about 
 sixteen or seventeen years old, had never 
 learned to speak, and soon showed that h« 
 had been shut out during his whole life from 
 all communication with the world. A nar- 
 row, dark dungeon, in which he was always 
 
obliged to remain in a sitting posture, so that 
 even his bones had assumed a peculiar shape, 
 had been all the space allowed to the unhappy 
 being in this wide world ; water and coarse 
 bread, all the food he had ever tasted ; a shirt, 
 all his clothing ; and now and then stripes, 
 inflicted by the unseen hand of his fiendish 
 keeper, when he happened to make a noise 
 — all he knew of any being besides himself 
 He was but just allowed to vegetate — and 
 what a wretched vegetation ! in his forlorn 
 condition. 
 
 Great pains, as the reader will see, have 
 been taken, without success, to raise the veil 
 of mystery hanging over this foul transaction, 
 continued even by an attempt to murder the 
 youth, when it was falsely reported in the 
 newspapers, that he was occupied with writing 
 his biography. But the great attention, 
 which was thus directed to him has, though 
 unsuccessful as to the detection of the perpe- 
 trators of the crime, not been without its 
 fruits, and it may be easily imagined, how 
 interesting must be a faithful account, like 
 the following, of the process of physical and 
 intellectual acclimatisation to life, if we may 
 be allowed to use this expression, which a 
 youth must undergo to fit him for society — 
 
Vll 
 
 for life and light, after his soul, intellect and 
 body had been left from his birth dormant 
 and undeveloped — abandoned to perfect soli- 
 tude. Light had never shone upon this be- 
 ing, neither on his eye, nor on his soul ; and 
 when he emerged from his lonesome dark- 
 ness, he was like a new born child in respect 
 to all which must be acquired by experience, 
 whilst the instruments for acquiring that ex- 
 perience, the natural faculties, of course differ- 
 ed from those of a child so far as they are 
 affected by the mere age or growth of the in- 
 dividual. Thus he presented an opportunity 
 for observation of the highest interest to the 
 psychological and moral philosopher, the re- 
 ligious teacher, the ph}'siologist and physi- 
 cian — an opportunity which must be as rare 
 as the crime which has afforded it. 
 
 Uncommonly attractive, however, as the 
 account of this interesting individual must 
 prove to every reflecting reader, whether he 
 considers particularly the moral, the intellec- 
 tual or physical condition of the being describ- 
 ed, its value is much enhanced to the lawyer 
 by the legal point of view in which its philoso- 
 phical and eminent author in one part of the 
 work examines his subject as constituting a 
 species of crime, never yet duly treated by 
 
via 
 
 any code or legislation — a view, forcibly ex- 
 pressed in the title of the German original, 
 which is thus, Kaspar Hauser, Beispiel 
 eines Verbrechens am Seelenhhen des Mens- 
 cheUj* which, literally translated, would be, 
 K. H. An Instance of a Crime against the 
 Life of the Soul (the Development of all its 
 intellectual, moral and immortal parts) of man. 
 We are sorry not to be able to preserve this 
 title in English, the reasons for which how- 
 ever, are obvious. Mr Von Feuerbach is 
 well known, as one of the most distinguished 
 jurists of the age, both for his extensive learn- 
 ing and the philosophical acuteness display- 
 ed in his numerous works, chiefly on penal 
 law. He, moreover, drew up the penal code 
 of Bavaria, and is at this time president of 
 one of the Bavarian courts of appeal. t Noth- 
 ing indifferent can come from his pen, nothing 
 doubtful be guaranteed by his name ; and it 
 is hardly necessary to add that the whole ac- 
 count is founded on official documents, wher- 
 ever it pretends to give positive facts, and that 
 
 ♦ Ansbach, 1832. 
 
 t A sketch of Mr Von Feuerbach's life, and an enu- 
 meration of his principal works may be found in the 
 Encyclopedia Americana. 
 
the only duty of those who offer a work of so 
 eminent an author to the public of another 
 country, is to give an exact translation. 
 
 In conclusion, we would mention that the 
 translator of this work is the same gentleman, 
 who has done himself so much credit by an 
 English version of Mr Cousin's History of 
 Philosophy ,=^ a task of no common difficulty, 
 and yet so successfully performed as to be a 
 pledge for the faithful executionof the present 
 work. FRANCIS LIEBER. 
 
 Boston, Nov. 1832. 
 
 Note to the Second Edition. Though 
 but a few months have elapsed since the first 
 edition of this work was issued, a second one 
 is called for, which we herewith offer to the 
 public, adding that no changes, except the 
 correction of a few errata, have been made 
 in it. F. L. 
 
 * Introduction to the History of Philosophy by Vic- 
 tor Cousin, Professor of Philosophy. Translated 
 from the French by Henning Gottfried Linberg. Bos- 
 ton, 1832. 
 
' OF THE 
 
 [U1TI7EIISITT^ 
 
 CASPAR HAUSER. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 Whitmonday is at Nuremberg a day of 
 great festivity ; when most of its inhabitants 
 sally forth from the city, and disperse them- 
 selves in the neighboring country and vil- 
 lages. The appearance of the city, which, 
 in consequence of the present scantiness of 
 its population, is very straggling, reminds us 
 on such occasions, and particularly in fine 
 spring weather, rather of an enchanted city in 
 the desert, than of an active, bustling, man- 
 ufacturing town ; and many secret deeds may, 
 in situations remote from its centre, then be 
 done publicly, without ceasing to be secret. 
 
 It was on Whitmonday, the 26th of May, 
 1828, in the evening between four and five 
 o'clock, that the following occurrence took 
 place. 
 
 A citizen, who lived at the so called Un- 
 1 
 
schlitt place, near the small and little fre- 
 quented Haller gate, was still loitering before 
 his door, and was about to proceed upon his 
 intended ramble through the new gate, when, 
 looking around him, he remarked at a little 
 distance a young man in a peasant's dress, 
 who was standing in a very singular posture, 
 and, like an intoxicated person, was endea- 
 voring to move forward, without being fully 
 able either to stand upright or to govern the 
 movements of his legs. The citizen ap- 
 proached the stranger, who held out to him a 
 letter, directed '^ To his honor the Captain 
 of the 4th Esgataron of the Shwolishay re- 
 giment. Nuremberg." As the Captain, 
 apparently referred to, lived near the New- 
 gate, the citizen took the strange youth along 
 with him to the guard room, whence the 
 latter was conducted to the dwelling of Cap- 
 tain von W. who at that time commanded 
 the 4th squadron of the 6th regiment of 
 Chevaux legers, and who lived in the neigh- 
 borhood."^ The stranger advanced towards 
 
 * The depositions concerning what passed while 
 Caspar and the above mentioned citizen were on their 
 way from the UnschUtt place to the guard room and 
 thence to Captain von W— 's dwelling, are so defec- 
 
the captain's servant who opened the door, 
 with his hat on his head and the letter in his 
 
 tive, so unsatisfactory, and withal so apocryphical, that 
 I have thought proper to reduce their contents within 
 a very narrow compass. Thus, for instance, the citi- 
 zen mentioned before has deposed, that, after many 
 attempts to enter into conversation with Caspar, and 
 after having asked him several questions, he at length 
 perceived that Caspar neither knew nor had the least 
 conception of what he meant, and that he therefore 
 ceased to speak to him. From this circumstance it 
 would appear, that Caspar's conduct towards him was 
 the same as it was the same evening, at Captain von 
 
 W 's, and afterwards at the guard room ; and as 
 
 it continued to be for several days and weeks in suc- 
 cession. Nevertheless the same citizen has also 
 stated, that Caspar had replied to the question, whence 
 he came ? " from Regensburg." And also, tliat when 
 they came to the new gate, Caspar had said ; " that 
 has just been built since they call it the new gate," 
 &.C. That witness fully believes that he heard such 
 expressions, appears to me to be as certain, as that 
 Caspar never said any such thing. This is fully proved 
 by all that follows. For it is highly probable that the 
 words which Caspar repeatedly uttered " Reuta waehn 
 wie mein Votta waehn is," may have thus been 
 understood by his conductor, who would scarcely 
 have paid much attention to the words of such a 
 simpleton as he conceived him to be. But upon the 
 whole, the official documents showing the proceedings 
 of the police on this occasion prove, that they have 
 been so irregular that the depositions taken contain f o 
 
hand, with the following words : " ae sechtene 
 mocht ih waehn, wie mei Votta waehn is." 
 The servant asked him what he wanted ? 
 who he was ? whence he came ? But the 
 stranger appeared to understand none of 
 these questions 5 and his only reply was a 
 repetition of the words " ae sechtene mocht 
 ih waehn, wie mei Votta waehn is," or " wo 
 as nit." He was, as the captain's servant 
 declared in his deposition, so much fatigued 
 that he could scarcely be said to walk, but 
 rather to stagger. Weeping, and with the 
 expression of excessive pain, he pointed to 
 his feet, which were sinking under him ; and 
 he appeared to be suffering from hunger and 
 thirst. A small piece of meat was handed 
 to him ; but scarcely had the first morsel 
 touched his lips, when he shuddered, the 
 muscles of his face were seized with convul- 
 sive spasms, and, with visible horror he spit 
 it out. He showed the same marks of aver- 
 sion when a glass of beer was brought to him, 
 and he had tasted a few drops of it. A bit 
 
 many contradictions that the witnesses have been so 
 slightly examined, and that many of their assertions 
 contain anachronisms which are so very palpable ; that 
 these documents cannot, without much caution, be 
 admitted as genuine sources of historical-truth. 
 
of bread and a glass of fresh water, he 
 swallowed greedily and with extreme satis- 
 faction. In the meantime, all attempts to 
 gain any information respecting his person or 
 his arrival were altogether fruitless. He 
 seemed to hear without understanding, to see 
 without perceiving, and to move his feet with- 
 out knowing how to use them for the pur- 
 pose of walking. His language consisted 
 mostly of tears, moans, and unintelligible 
 sounds, or of the words, which he frequently 
 repeated : '' Reuta wahn, wie mei Votta 
 wahn is." In the Captain's house, he was 
 soon taken for a kind of savage, and, in ex- 
 pectation of the captain's return, he was con- 
 ducted to the stable, where he immediately 
 stretched himself on the straw, and fell into 
 a profound sleep. 
 
 He had already slept for some hours, when 
 the Captain returned and went directly to his 
 stable, in order to see the savage human be- 
 ing of whom his children, at his first entrance, 
 had related so many strange things. He 
 still lay in a profound sleep. Attempts were 
 made to awaken him ; he was jogged, he was 
 shaken and thumped, but all to no purpose. 
 They raised him from the ground, and en- 
 1* 
 
deavored to place him on his feet. But he 
 still continued to sleep, and seemed, like a 
 person apparently dead, to be distinguishable 
 from one who is really so, only by his vital 
 heat. At length, after many troublesome and 
 painful experiments upon the sleeper's capa- 
 city of feeling, he opened his eyes, he awoke, 
 he gazed at the bright colors of the Captain's 
 glittering uniform which he seemed to regard • 
 with childish satisfaction, and then groaned 
 
 out his " Reuta, &tc." Captain von W 
 
 knew nothing of the stranger, nor could he 
 learn anything relating to him from the letter 
 which he had brought. And as, by question- 
 ing, nothing could be got out of him but, 
 " Reuta wahn, he : " or " woas nit ; " nothing 
 remained to be done, but to leave the solu- 
 tion of this riddle and the care of the stran- 
 ger's person to the city police. He was ac- 
 cordingly sent forthwith to the police office. 
 At about 8 o'clock in the evening bis 
 journey thither, which, in his situation, was 
 a course of martyrdom, was accomplished. 
 In the guard room, besides some of the 
 inferior magistrates, several soldiers of the 
 police were present. All of them regarded the 
 strange lad as a most extraordinary phenom- 
 
enon. Not* was it easy to decide to which 
 of the common rubrlcks of police business 
 his case appertained. The common offi- 
 cial questionSj what is your name ? what is 
 your business ? whence came you ? for what 
 purpose are you come ? where is your pass- 
 port ? and the like, were here of no avaiL 
 " Ae Reuta waehn wie mei Votta waehn 
 is," or ; " woas nit, " or, which he also often 
 repeated in a lamentable tone, '4ioani 
 weissa ! " were the only words which, on the 
 most diverse occasions he uttered.* 
 
 He appeared neither to know nor to suspect 
 where he was. He betrayed neither fear, 
 nor astonishment, nor confusion ; he rather 
 showed an almost brutish dulness, which 
 either leaves external objects entirely unno- 
 ticed, or stares at them without thought, and 
 suffers them to pass without being effected 
 by them. His tears and whimpering, while 
 he was always pointing to his tottering feet, 
 and his awkward, and at the same time 
 
 * To these expressions and particularly, " Rueta, 
 waehn,'* &c, he attached, as was afterwards discov-^ 
 eied, no particular meaning. They were only sounds, 
 which had been taught him like a parrot, and which 
 he uttered as the common expressions of all his ideas, 
 sensations and desires. 
 
/ 
 
 8 
 
 childish demeanor soon excited the compas- 
 sion of all who were present. A soldier 
 brought him a piece of meat and a glass of 
 beer ; but, as at the house of Captain von 
 
 W , he rejected both with abhorrence, 
 
 and ate only bread with fresh water. Another 
 person gave him a piece of coin. At this 
 he showed the joy of a little child ; played 
 with it and by several times crying ross, 
 ross, [horse, horse] as well as by certain 
 motions of his hands, he seemed to express 
 his wish to hang this coin about the neck of 
 some horse. His whole conduct and demea- 
 nor, seemed to be that of a child scarcely two 
 or three years old, with the body of a young 
 man. 
 
 The only difference of opinion that seemed 
 to exist among the greater part of these po- 
 lice men, was, whether he should be consi- 
 dered as an idiot or a madman, or as a kind 
 of savage. One or two of them expressed, 
 however, a doubt, whether, under the ap- 
 pearance of this boy some cunning deceiver 
 might not possibly be concealed. This sus- 
 picion received no small degree of confirma- 
 tion from the following circumstance. Some 
 person thought of trying whether he could 
 
write ; and handing him a pen with ink, laid 
 a sheet of paper before him with an intimation 
 that he should write. This appeared to give 
 him pleasure, he took the pen, by no means 
 awkwardly, between his fingers, and wrote, 
 to the astonishment of all who were present, 
 in legible characters, the name, Kaspar 
 Hauser. 
 
 He was now told to add also the name of 
 the place whence he came. But he did noth- 
 ing more than occasionally to groan out, his 
 " Reuta waehn, " &;c, his *' hoam weissa," 
 and his " woas nit." 
 
 As nothing more could be done, for the 
 present, he was delivered to a servant of the 
 police, who conducted him to the tower at 
 the Vestner gate, which is used as a place 
 of confinement for rogues, and vagabonds, 
 &LC. Upon this comparatively short way he 
 sank down groaning at almost every step, if, 
 indeed, his groping movements may be called 
 steps. Having reached the small apartment 
 in which, together with another prisoner of 
 the police, he was confined, he sank down 
 immediately upon his straw bed, in a profound 
 sleep. 
 
 i 
 
CHAPTER II. 
 
 Caspar Hauser — this name he has hither- 
 to retained — wore upon his head, when he 
 came to Nuremberg, a round and rather 
 coarse felt hat, shaped like those worn in 
 cities, lined with yellow silk, and bound with 
 red leather, inside of which a picture of the 
 city of Munchen, half scratched out, was 
 still visible. The toes of his naked feet peep- 
 ed forth from a pair of high heeled boots, 
 shod with iron shoes and nails, which were 
 much torn and did not fit him. Around his 
 neck was tied a black silk neck cloth. Over 
 a coarse shirt,* and a half faded red spotted 
 stuff waistcoat he wore a sort of jacket, such 
 
 * Which imprudently, together with the hoots, was, 
 as was asserted, on account of their bad condition,** 
 thrown away very soon after this occurrence took 
 place. So little attention was paid to things which, 
 in point of circumstantial evidence, might have be- 
 come highly important. 
 
11 
 
 as are commonly worn by country folks, and 
 called janker or schalk, but which, as was 
 afterwards proved by a more minute inspec- 
 tion of it and by the declaration of compe- 
 tent judges, was not originally cut out by the 
 tailor for a peasant jacket. It had formerly, 
 as also appears from the cut of its cape, been 
 a frock coat, of which the skirts had been cut 
 off and the upper part sewed up with coarse 
 stitches by a hand unaccustomed to tailor's 
 work. Also the pantaloons which were made 
 of gray cloth of a somewhat finer quality, and 
 which, like overalls for riding, were lined be- 
 tween the legs with the same cloth, seemed 
 originally to have belonged rather to some 
 footman, groom, or forester, than to a peasant. 
 Caspar wore a white handkerchief with red 
 crossed stripes, marked in red with the ini- 
 tials K. H. Besides some blue and white 
 figured rags, a key of german manufacture, 
 and a paper of gold sand — which no one 
 surely would look for in a peasant's cottage — 
 there were found in his pocket a small horn 
 rosary, and a pretty considerable store of 
 spiritual wealth, viz. besides manuscript cath- 
 olic prayers, several printed, spiritual publi- 
 
12 
 
 cations, such as, in the south of Germany and 
 particularly at places to which pilgrims resort, 
 are commonly offered in exchange for good 
 money, to the faithful multitude. In some, 
 the places where they were printed were not 
 named. Others appeared to have been print- 
 ed at Altottingen, Burghausen, Salzburg, 
 and Prague. Their edifying tides were, for 
 instance, " Spiritual sentinel," — " Spiritual 
 forget me not" — " A very powerful prayer 
 by virtue of which one may participate in the 
 benefits of all holy masses," &:c : — " Pray- 
 er to the holy guardian angel," — Prayer 
 to the holy blood," he. One of these pre- 
 cious little spiritual works, entitled : " The art 
 of regaining lost time and years misspent" 
 (without mentioning the year of publication) 
 seems to contain a scoffing allusion to the life 
 which this youth, according to what he after- 
 wards related, had hitherto led. Judging 
 from ihese spiritual donations, there can be 
 no doubt, that the hands concerned in this 
 transaction were not exclusively secular. 
 The letter addressed, without naming him/ 
 to the Captain of the fourth Squadron of the 
 sixth regiment of Chevaux-legers, which 
 
^^ OF THE ^ 
 
 Caspar held in his hand when he m S ^ ap^oar ^-"""^^ 
 ed in Nuremberg, runs as follows :* 
 
 **■ From a place, near the Bavarian frontier which shall 
 
 be nameless, 1828. 
 
 "HIGH AND WELL BORN CapTAIN ! 
 
 " I send you a boy who wishes faithfully 
 to serve his king. This boy was left in my 
 house the 7th day of October, 1812 ; and I 
 am myself a poor day laborer, who have also 
 ten children and have enough to do to main- 
 tain my own family. The mother of the 
 child only put him in my house for the sake 
 of having him brought up. But I have never 
 been able to discover who his mother is ; 
 nor have I ever given information to the pro- 
 vincial court that such a child was placed in 
 my house. I thought I ought to receive him 
 as my son. I have given him a christian 
 
 * This letter agrees in the German original literally 
 with the manuscript alluded to ; which, from its style 
 and orthography, appears evidently to have been in- 
 tended to pass for the production of some ignorant 
 peasant. No attempt has been made by the translator 
 to retain, in this respect, its original character. It has 
 been simply translated into plain English, according to 
 what appeared to be the most obvious signification of 
 the words, whose meaning however is not in all its 
 parts perfectly intelligible. 
 2 
 
14 
 
 education ; and since 18121 have never suf- 
 fered him to take a single step out of my 
 house. So that no one knows where he was 
 brought up. Nor does he know either the 
 name of my house or where it is. You may 
 ask him, but he cannot tell you. 1 have al- 
 ready taught him to read and write, and he 
 writes my handwriting exactly as I do. And 
 when we asked him what he would be, he 
 said he would be one of the Chevaux-legers, 
 as his father was. If he had had parents dif- 
 ferent from what he has, he would have be- 
 come a learned lad. If you show him any- 
 thing, he learns it immediately. I have only 
 showed him the way to Neumark, whence he 
 was to go to you. I told him, that when he 
 had once become a soldier I should come to 
 take him home, or I should lose my head. 
 Good Mr Captain, you nee'd not try him ; he 
 does not know the place where 1 am. I took 
 him away in the middle of the night, and he 
 knows not the way home. 
 
 " I am your most obedient servant. 1 do 
 not sign my name, for I might be punished. 
 He has not a kreutzer of money ; because I 
 have none myself. If you do not keep him, 
 
15 
 
 you may get rid of him, or let him be scram- 
 bled for." 
 
 With this letter, which was written in Ger- 
 man characters, the following note, written in 
 Latin characters, but evidently by the same 
 hand, was inclosed : 
 
 " The child is already baptised. You must 
 give him a surname yourself. You must ed- 
 ucate the child. His father was one of the 
 Chevaux-legers. When he is 17 years old 
 send him to Nuremberg to the sixth Chevaux- 
 leger regiment, for there his father also was. 
 I ask for his education until he is seventeen 
 years old. He was born the 30th of April, 
 1812. I am a poor girl and cannot support 
 him. His father is dead." 
 
 Caspar Hauser"^ was, when he appeared 
 at Nuremberg, four feet nine inches in 
 height and about from sixteen to seventeen 
 years old. His chin and lips were very 
 thinly covered with down ; the so called 
 
 * The following description of his person is not taken 
 from the records of the police, where it was not to be 
 found ; but from my own observations and from the 
 witten notes of persons on whom full reliance may 
 be placed. 
 
16 
 
 wisdom teeth were yet wanting; nor did 
 they make their appearance before the 
 year 1831. His light brown hair, which 
 was very fine and curled in ringlets, was cut 
 according to the fashion of peasants. The 
 structure of his body, which was stout and 
 broad shouldered, showed perfect symmetry 
 without any visible defect. His skin was fine 
 and very fair ; his complexion was not florid, 
 but neither was it of a sickly hue ; his limbs 
 were delicately built ; his small hands were 
 beautifully formed ; and his feet, which show- 
 ed no marks of ever before Having been con- 
 fined or pressed by a shoe, were equally so. 
 The soles of his feet, which were without any 
 horny skin, were as soft as the palms of his 
 hands ; and they were covered all over with 
 blood blisters, the marks of which were some 
 months later still visible. Both his arms 
 showed the scars of inoculation ; and on his 
 right arm, a wound still covered with a fi*esh 
 scab was observable, which, as Caspar after- 
 wards related, was occasioned by a blow 
 given him with a slick or a piece of wood by 
 the man " with whom he had always been," 
 because he had made rather too much noise. 
 His face was at that time very vulgar : when 
 
17 
 
 in a state of tranquillity it was almost without 
 any expression ; and its lower features, be- 
 ing somewhat prominent, gave him a brutish 
 appearance. The staring look of his blue 
 but clear and bright eyes had also an ex- 
 pression of brutish obtuseness."* The forma- 
 tion of his face altered in a few months al- 
 most entirely 5 his countenance gained ex- 
 pression and animation, the prominent lower 
 features of his face receded more and more, 
 and his earlier physiognomy could scarcely 
 any longer be recognised. His weeping was 
 at first only an ugly contortion of his mouth ; 
 but, if anything pleasant affected his mind, a 
 lovely, smiling, heart winning sweetness dif- 
 fused over all his features the irresistible charm 
 that lies concealed in the joy of an innocent 
 child. He scarcely at all knew how to use 
 his hands and fingers. He stretched out 
 his fingers, stiff and straight and far asunder, 
 with the exception of his first finger and 
 
 * The author expressed at that time, his wish that 
 Caspar's picture might be taken by a skilful portrait 
 painter ; because he felt assured that his features 
 would soon alter. His wish was not gratified, but 
 bis prediction was very soon fulfilled. 
 
 2* 
 
18 
 
 thumb, whose tips he commonly held to* 
 gether so as to form a circle. Where others 
 applied but a few fingers he used his whole 
 hand in the most uncouth and awkward 
 manner imaginable. His gait, like that of 
 an infant making its first essays in leading 
 strings, was properly speaking not a walk but 
 rather a waddling, tottering, groping of the 
 way, — a painful medium between the mo- 
 tion of falling and the endeavor to stand up- 
 right. In attempting to v/alk, instead of first 
 treading firmly on his heel, he placed his 
 heels and the balls of his feet at once to the 
 ground, and raising both feet simultaneously 
 with an inclination of the upper part of his 
 body, he stumbled slowly and heavily for- 
 ward, with out-stretched arms, which he 
 seemed to use as balance poles. The slight- 
 est impediment in his way caused him often, 
 in his little chamber, to fall flat on the floor. 
 For a long time after his arrival he could not 
 go up or down stairs without assistance. 
 And even now, it is still impossible for him 
 to stand on one foot and to raise, to bend, or 
 to stretch the other, without falling down. 
 The following results of a medical examina- 
 
19 
 
 tion of the body of Caspar Hauser, made by 
 order of a court of justice in the year 1830, 
 furnish us with the following highly inter- 
 esting data which throw much light upon 
 the circumstances of his life. 
 
 " The knee," says Dr Osterhausen in his 
 report, '^ exhibits a remarkable deviation from 
 the usual formation. In the natural structure 
 of the part, the patilla or kneepan forms a 
 prominence anteriorly during the extension 
 of the leg. But in Hauser it lay in a con- 
 siderable depression. In a limb naturally 
 formed, the four extensor muscles of the leg, 
 the vastus externus and the vastus internus, 
 the rectus femoris and the crureus are attach- 
 ed by a common tendon to a protuberance 
 of the tibia or shin bone, after having formed 
 an intimate connexion with the kneepan. 
 But in Hauser the tendon was divided ; and 
 the two tendons of the external and internal 
 vasti muscles proceeded separately down the 
 leg to the outer and inner sides of the tuber- 
 cle of the tibia, and were inserted below the 
 tubercle into this bone. Between these two 
 tendons lay the patilla. This unusual forma- 
 tion of the part, together with a remarkable 
 
20 
 
 developement of the two tendons, occasioned 
 the depression in which the patilla was situ- 
 ated. When Hauser sits down, with the 
 thigh and leg extended horizontally on the 
 floor, the back forms a right angte with the 
 flexure of the thigh, and the knee joint lies 
 extended so close to the floor that not the 
 smallest hollow is perceptible in the ham. 
 A common playing card could scarcely be 
 thrust between the ham and the floor." 
 
CHAPTER III. 
 
 The surprise occasioned by Caspar Hau- 
 ser's first appearance soon settled down into 
 the form of a dark and horrid enigma, to ex- 
 plain which various conjectures were resorted 
 to. By no means an ideot or a madman, he 
 was so mild, so obedient and so good-natured, 
 that no one could be tempted to regard this 
 stranger as a savage, or as a child grown up 
 among the wild beasts of the forest. And 
 yet he was so entirely destitute of words and 
 conceptions, he wasi§o totally unacquainted 
 with the most common objects and daily oc- 
 currences of nature, and he showed so great 
 an indifference, nay, such an abhorrence, to 
 all the usual customs, conveniences, and 
 necessaries of life ; and at the same time he 
 evinced such extraordinary peculiarities in 
 all the characteristics of his mental, moral 
 and physical existence, as seemed to leave us 
 
22 
 
 no other choice, than either to regard him as 
 the inhabitant of some other planet, miracu- 
 lously transferred to the earth, or as one who, 
 (like the man whom Plato supposes) had been 
 born and bred under ground, and who, now 
 that he had arrived to the age of maturity, 
 had for the first time ascended to the surface 
 of the earth and beheld the light of the sun. 
 Caspar showed continually the greatest 
 aversion to all kinds of meat and drink, ex- 
 cepting dry bread and water. Without swal- 
 lowing or even tasting them, the very smell 
 of most kinds of our common food was suf- 
 ficient to make him shudder or to affect him 
 still more disagreeably. The least drop of 
 wine, of cofiee, or the like, mixed clandes- 
 tinely with his water, occasioned him cold 
 sweats, or caused hiojfc to be seized with 
 vomiting or violent headache.*^ 
 
 * It is much to be regretted that in the whole 
 city of Nuremberg not a single individual was to 
 be found who possessed scientific curiosity sufficient 
 to induce him to make this person the subject of 
 physiological inquiries. Even the chemical analysis 
 of the saliva, or other substances ejected by this 
 young man, who had been solely fed on bread and 
 
23 
 
 A certain person made, somewhere, the 
 attempt to force some brandy upon him on 
 pretence that it was water ; scarcely had the 
 glass been brought to his lips, when he turn- 
 ed pale, sunk down, and would have fallen 
 backward against a glass door, if he had not 
 been instantly supported. — Once when the 
 prison keeper had prevailed upon him to 
 take some coffee in his mouth, although he 
 could scarcely have swallowed a single drop 
 of it, his bowels were in consequence thereof 
 repeatedly affected. — A few drops of beer 
 made o( malted wheat, though much di- 
 luted with water, gave him a violent pain in 
 his stomach, accompanied with so great a 
 heat that he was all over dripping with per- 
 spiration ; which was succeeded by an ague 
 attended with headache and violent eructa- 
 
 water, might alone have furnished many not unimpor- 
 tant scientific results ; which results would at the same 
 time have verified, as it were with intuitive certainty, 
 the highly important juridical fact that Caspar had 
 been really fed on nothing but bread and water. But 
 at the time wh3n the judicial authorities, after many 
 fruitless endeavors on their part, were at length placed 
 in a proper situation to engage in the examination of 
 Hauser's case, every opportunity of making amends 
 for what had been lost by such omissions had long 
 passed by. 
 
24 
 
 tions. — Even milk, whether boiled or fresh, 
 was unpalatable to him, and caused him dis- 
 gusting eructations. — Some meat was once 
 concealed in his bread ; he smelt it imme- 
 diately, and expressed a great aversion to 
 it, but he was nevertheless prevailed upon to 
 eat it ; and he felt afterwards extremely ill 
 in consequence of having done so. During 
 the night, which, with him, commenced re- 
 gularly with the setting, and ended with the 
 rising of the sun, he lay upon his straw bed 5 
 in the day time he sat upon the floor with his 
 legs stretched out straight before him. When 
 in the first days, he saw for the first time a 
 lighted candle placed before him he was de- 
 lighted with the shining flame, and unsus- 
 pectingly put his fingers into it ; but he soon 
 drew it back, crying out and weeping. 
 Feigned cuts and thrusts were made at him 
 with a naked sabre, in order to try what might 
 be their effect upon him ; but he remained 
 immoveable, without even winking ; nor did 
 he seem to harbor the least suspicion that 
 any harm could thus be done to him.* 
 
 ** It is even said that by way of an amusing experi- 
 ment, a pistol or some otlier piece of fire arms was 
 once discharged at him. 
 
25 
 
 When a looking glass was once held before 
 him, he caught at his own reflected image, 
 and then looked behind it to find the person 
 whom he supposed to be concealed there. 
 Like a little child, he endeavored to lay hold 
 on every glittering object that he saw ; and 
 when he could not reach it, or when he was 
 forbidden to touch it, he cried. Some days 
 after his arrival^ Caspar was conducted, un- 
 der the escort of two police men, around the 
 city, in order to discover whether he could 
 recognise the gate through which he had en- 
 tered. But, as might have been foreseen, 
 he knew not how to distinguish the one from 
 the other; and, upon the whole, he appeared 
 to take no notice whatsoever of what was 
 passing before his eyes. When objects were 
 brought more than ordinarily near to him, 
 he gazed at them with a stupid look,« which, 
 only in particular instances, was expressive 
 of curiosity and astonishment. He was in 
 possession of only two words which he oc- 
 casionally used for the purpose of designating 
 living creatures. Whatever appeared to him 
 in a human form he called, without any dis- 
 tinction of sex or age, " bua ;" and to every 
 3 
 
26 
 
 animal that he met with, whether quadruped 
 or biped, dog, cat, goose, or fowl, he gave 
 the name of " ross" (horse.) If such horses 
 were white he appeared to be pleased ; black 
 animals were regarded by him with aversion 
 and fear. A black hen, advancing towards 
 him, once put him in great fear ; he cried 
 out, and, though his feet refused to perform 
 their office, he made every effort to run 
 away from her. 
 
 Not only his mind but many of his senses 
 appeared at first to be in a state of torpor, 
 and only gradually to open to the perception 
 of external qbjects. It was not before the 
 Ispse of several days that he began to notice 
 the striking of the steeple clock, and the 
 ringing of the bells. This threw him into 
 the greatest astonishment, which at first was 
 expressed only by his listening looks and by 
 certain spasmodic motions of his countenance ; 
 but it was soon succeeded by a stare of 
 benumbed meditation. Some weeks after- 
 wards the nuptial procession of a peasant 
 passed by the tower with a band of music 
 close under his window. He suddenly stood 
 listening, motionless as a statue ; his counteu- 
 
27 
 
 ance appeared to be transfigured, and his 
 eyes as it were to radiate his ecstasy ; his 
 ears and eyes seemed continually to follow 
 the movements of the sounds as they reced- 
 ed more and more ; and they had long 
 ceased to be audible, while he still continued 
 immovably fixed in a listening posture, as if 
 unwilling to lose the last vibrations of these, 
 to him, celestial notes, or as if his soul had 
 followed them and left its body behind it, in 
 torpid insensibility. Certainly not by way 
 of making any very judicious trial of Caspar's 
 musical taste, this being, whose extraordinary 
 nervous excitability was already sufficiently 
 apparent, was once, at a military parade, 
 placed very near to the great regimental 
 drum. He was so powerfully affected by 
 its first sounds, as to be immediately thrown 
 into convulsions, which rendered his instanta- 
 neous removal necessary. 
 
 Among the many remarkable phenomena 
 which appeared in Caspar's conduct, it was 
 soon observed that the idea of horses and 
 particularly of wooden horses, was one which 
 in his eyes must have acquired no small de- 
 gree of importance. The word " Ross'* 
 
28 
 
 (horse) appeared in his dictionary, which 
 contained scarcely half a dozen words, to 
 fill the greatest space. This word he pro- 
 nounced on the most diverse occasions, more 
 frequently than any other, and often indeed 
 with tears in his eyes, and with a plaintive, 
 beseeching tone of voice, which seemed to 
 express a longing for some particular horse. 
 Whenever any trifle, as for instance a glitter- 
 ing coin, a ribbon, a little picture, &c, was 
 given him, he cried : " Ross ! Ross !" and 
 notified by his looks and motions his wish to 
 hang all these pretty things upon a horse. 
 Caspar, who — not indeed to any great advan- 
 tage of his mental development, or to the 
 making of such accurate observations on his 
 peculiarities as the rarity of such a phe- 
 nomenon rendered desirable — was daily con- 
 ducted to the guard room of the police, be- 
 came there as it were domesticated, and 
 gained the good will and affection of all its 
 constant attendants. The words " Ross ! 
 Ross ! " which, also here, he so often repeat- 
 ed, suggested to one of the police soldiers, 
 who had always taken the most notice of this 
 singular amalgamation of adolescence and 
 
29 
 
 childhood, the idea of bringing him, at the 
 guard room, a toy of a wooden horse. Cas- 
 par, who had hitherto on almost all occasions 
 showed the greatest insensibility and indiffer- 
 ence, and who generally seemed much de- 
 jected, appeared now to be as it were sud- 
 denly transformed, and conducted himself as 
 if he had found in this little horse an old 
 and long desired friend. Without noisy 
 demonstrations of joy, but with a counte- 
 nance smiling in his tears, he immediately 
 seated himself on the floor by the side of 
 the horse, stroked it, patted it, kept his eyes 
 immovably fixed upon it, and endeavored to 
 hang upon it all the variegated, glittering and 
 tinkhng trifles which the benevolence of 
 those about him had presented to him. Only 
 now that he could decorate his little horse 
 with them, all these things appeared to have 
 acquired their true value. When the hour 
 arrived when he was to leave the police 
 guard room, he endeavored to lift up the 
 horse, in order to take it along with him ; and 
 he wept bitterly when he found that his arras 
 and legs were so weak that he could not lift 
 3* 
 
30 
 
 his favorite over the threshold of the door.* 
 Whenever he afterwards returned to the 
 guard room, he immediately placed himself 
 on the floor by the side of his dear little 
 horse^ without paying the least attention to 
 the people who were about him. " For hours 
 together," said one of the police soldiers in 
 the declaration which he afterwards made 
 before the police court, " Caspar sat playing 
 with his horse by the side of the stove, with- 
 out attending in the least to anything that 
 passed around him or by his side." 
 
 But also in the tower, in his small cham- 
 ber and sitting room, he was soon supplied 
 not only with one but with several horses. 
 These horses were henceforward, whenever 
 he was at home, his constant companions 
 and playmates, which he never suffered to 
 be removed from his side, of which he 
 never lost sight, and with which — as could 
 
 * He was for a long time afterwards, extremely 
 weak in his arms as well as in his feet. It was not 
 before the month of September, 1828, after he had 
 already commenced to eat meat, tliat his strength was, 
 by continued exercise, so far increased, as to enable 
 him to lift a weight of twentyfive pounds with both 
 his hands a little way from the ground. 
 
31 
 
 be observed through a concealeS'^Tjpenmg' 
 made in the door — he continually employed 
 himself. Every day, every hour resembled 
 the other in this, that all of them were 
 passed by Caspar sitting on the floor by the 
 side of his horses, with his legs stretched 
 out before him, and continually employed in 
 ornamenting them one way or another, with 
 ribbons and strings, or with bits of colored 
 paper, sometimes bedecking them with coins, 
 bells, and spangles, and sometimes appearing 
 to be immersed in the thought how this de- 
 coration might be varied by successively 
 placing these articles in different positions. 
 He also often dragged his horses backwards 
 and forwards by his side, without changing 
 his place or altering his position ; yet this 
 was done silently and very carefully, for fear, 
 as he afterwards said, that the rolling of the 
 wheels might make a noise and he might be 
 beaten for it. He never ate his bread with- 
 out first holding every morsel of it to the 
 mouth of some one of his horses ; nor did 
 he ever drink water without first dipping 
 their mouths in it, which he afterwards care- 
 fully wiped oflf. One of these horses was of 
 
32 
 
 plaster, and its mouth was consequently very 
 soon softened. He could not conceive how 
 this happened ; because he perceived that 
 the mouths of his other horses, although 
 they also were immersed in water, remained 
 unaltered. The prison keeper, to whom 
 with tears in his eyes he showed the misfor- 
 tune that had befallen his plaster horse, com- 
 forted him by insinuating that " this horse did 
 not like to drink water." In consequence 
 of this information he ceased to water it, as 
 he believed that the horse, by this visible 
 deformity of his mouth, indicated his dislike 
 to water. The prison keeper, who saw 
 what pains Caspar took to feed his horses 
 with his bread, endeavored to make him un- 
 derstand that these horses could not eat. — 
 But Caspar thought he had sufficiently re- 
 futed him by pointing to the crumbs which 
 stuck in their mouths. — One of his horses 
 had a bridle in its mouth which was wide 
 open 5 hence he also made a bridle of gold 
 spangles joined together for his other horse ; 
 and he took great pains to induce it to open 
 its mouth and to let him place the bridle 
 into it, — an attempt in which he persisted, 
 
33 
 
 for two whole days with unwearied persever- 
 ance. Having once fallen asleep on a rock- 
 ing horse, he fell down and squeezed his 
 finger ; upon which he complained that the 
 horse had bitten him. — As he was once 
 dragging one of his horses over the floor, its 
 hind feet having got into a hole, it reared up. 
 At this occurrence he expressed the most 
 lively satisfaction; he afterwards frequently 
 repeated a spectacle which appeared to him 
 so very remarkable, and he treated all his 
 visitors to a sight of it. When the prison 
 keeper afterwards expressed his displeasure 
 at his always showing the same thing to 
 every body, he ceased indeed to do so ; but 
 he cried at his being no longer permitted to 
 show his rearing horse. Once, when, in 
 rearing, this horse fell down, he ran to it with 
 precipitate tenderness, and expressed his 
 sorrow that it had hurt itself. But he was 
 quite inconsolable, when the prison keeper 
 once drove a nail into one of his horses. 
 
 From this, as well as from many other 
 circumstances, it may well be supposed, and 
 it afterwards proved to be quite certain, that, 
 in his infantine soul, ideas of things animate or 
 
34 
 
 inanimate, organic or unorganized, or of what 
 is produced by nature or formed by art, were 
 still strangely mingled together. 
 
 He distinguished animals from men only 
 by their form, as men from women only by 
 their dress ; and the clothing of the female 
 sex was, on account of its varied and striking 
 colors, far more pleasing to him than that of 
 males ; on which account he afterwards also 
 frequently expressed his desire to become a 
 girl ; that is, to wear female apparel. That 
 children should become grown people, was 
 quite inconceivable to him ; and he was par- 
 ticularly obstinate in denying this fact, when 
 he was told that he himself had once been a 
 little child, and that he would probably grow 
 much taller than he then was. Nor was he 
 convinced of its truth, until some months 
 afterwards, when repeated trials, made by 
 marking his measure upon the wall, proved to 
 him by experience the fact of his own and 
 indeed very rapid growth. 
 
 Not a spark of religion, not the smallest 
 particle of any dogmatic system was to be 
 found in his soul ; how great soever the ill 
 timed pains might be which, immediately or 
 
35 
 
 in the first week after his arrival, were taken 
 by several clergymen to seek for and to 
 awaken them. Indeed, no animal could have 
 shown itself more unable to comprehend, or 
 to form any conception of what they meant 
 by all their questions, discourses and sermons, 
 than Caspar. All the religion that he brought 
 with him, (if the name may without scandal be 
 thus misapplied,) was that, with which the 
 stupid piety of devout villains had furnished 
 his pockets, at his first exposure in Nurem- 
 berg. 
 
 It may perhaps not be uninteresting, to 
 hear the observations made on Caspar's con- 
 duct and demeanor, during his abode in the 
 tower, by a plain but sensible man, the prison 
 keeper Hiltel, who had the care of him for 
 several weeks. His declaration contained 
 in the protocol, as far as it relates to this 
 subject, is to the following effect: "Soon 
 after I had *for some time silently observed 
 the pretended Caspar Hauser, I was fully 
 convinced that he was by no means an idiot 
 or one who had been neglected by nature, 
 but that he must in some inconceivable man- 
 ner have been deprived of all means of culti- 
 
36 
 
 vating and developing his mind. To relate 
 all the innumerable proofs of this which are 
 contained in various phenomena that I have 
 observed in Hauser^s conduct, would extend 
 my narration to too great a length. During 
 the first days of his abode with me, his con- 
 duct was precisely that of a little child, and 
 displayed in every respect nothing but nature 
 and innocence. On the fourth or fifth day, 
 he was removed from the upper and more 
 closely confined part of the tower prison to 
 the lower story, in which I lived with my 
 family, and he was lodged in a small cham- 
 ber, which was so arranged, that I could 
 constantly observe his movements, without 
 his being able to perceive it. Here 1 have, 
 in obedience to the orders given me by the 
 burghermaster, frequently noticed his con- 
 duct when he was alone ; and I have always 
 found it to be perfectly uniform. He amused 
 himself, when alone, with his playthings, in 
 the same natural and unaffected manner as 
 when he was in my presence. For, in the 
 beginning, when he was once fully occupied 
 with his playthings, it was of no consequence 
 whatsoever what else occurred around him ; 
 
37 
 
 for he took not the slightest notice of it. I 
 must however remark, that the pleasure which 
 he thus took in childish playthings, did not 
 continue very long. When once his mind 
 had been directed to more serious and more 
 useful occupations, and had become accus- 
 tomed to them, he no longer took delight in 
 playing. His whole demeanor was, so to 
 speak, a perfect mirror of childlike innocence. 
 There was nothing deceitful in him ; his ex- 
 pressions exactly corresponded with the dic- 
 tates of his heart, that is, as far as the poverty 
 of his language would admit of it. When 
 once my wife and myself undressed him, in 
 order to cleanse his body, he gave full 
 proof of his innocence and ignorance ; his 
 conduct, on that occasion, was precisely that 
 of a child; quite natural and unembarrassed.* 
 
 * Noi long afterwards, however, a feeling of modesty 
 "was awakened in him ; and he then became as bashful 
 as the most chaste and delicate maiden. An exposure 
 of his person he now regards with horror. After the 
 wild Brazilian girl Isabella, whom Messrs Spix and 
 Martins had brought to Munchen, had lived for 
 some time among civilized people and worn clothes, 
 it was not without much trouble, nor yet without 
 threats and blows, that she could be brought to undress 
 herself that her shape might be drawn by an artist, 
 
 4 
 
S8 
 
 After he had got his playthings, and after 
 other persons had been admitted to him, I 
 sometimes permitted my son Julius, who is 
 eleven years old, to go to see him. He as 
 it were taught him to speak, showed him 
 how to form his letters, and communicated to 
 him such conceptions as he himself possessed. 
 I also sometimes permitted my daughter 
 Margaret, a little girl of three years old, to go 
 into his room. He at first, took great delight 
 in playing with her, and she taught him to 
 string glass beads. This amusement ceased 
 to give him satisfaction, as soon as he be- 
 gan to grow tired of inanimate playthings. 
 During the latter part of his abode with me, 
 he derived his greatest pleasure and amuse- 
 ment from drawings and copperplates, which 
 he stuck to the walls of his chamber." 
 
CHAPTER IV. 
 
 In a very few days after his first arrival, 
 Caspar was no longer considered in the tower 
 as a prisoner, but as a forsaken and neglected 
 child, who needed to be cared for and edu- 
 cated. The prison keeper admitted him to 
 his family tabic, where, although he would 
 not partake of any food, yet he learned to 
 sit in a proper manner, to use his hands as a 
 human being and to become acquainted with 
 and to imitate many of the customs of civil- 
 ized life. Most willingly did he play with the 
 children of the keeper ; who, on their part, 
 were by no means disinclined to amuse them- 
 selves with this good-natured youth, whose 
 excessive ignorance was diverting, even to 
 children. But particularly Julius, who was 
 eleven years old, became greatly attached to 
 Caspar, and felt his incipient vanity not a 
 Kttk flattered by the occupation of teaching 
 
40 
 
 this robust youth, around whose chin the first 
 rudiments of a beard had already begun ta 
 sprout — how to speak. Curiosity soon 
 brought, every day and even every hour, 
 muhitudes of people around him, of whom 
 few were willing to content themselves with 
 merely gazing at the tame savage. Most of 
 them found some means of busying them- 
 selves with liim in one way or another. Some 
 indeed, regarded him only as an object of 
 amusement, or of experiments by no means 
 scientlfical. Yet, there were many who con- 
 versed with him rationally, and who endea- . 
 vored to awaken his mind to a communica- 
 tion of ideas. One pronounced words and 
 phrases which he made him repeat, another 
 strove by signs and gestures to make unknown 
 things known, and unintelligible things intelli- 
 gible to him. Everything, even every play- 
 thing, by the gift of which the kind inhabi- 
 tants of Nuremberg expressed their good 
 will and attention to the poor youth, supplied 
 him with new materials of thought, and tended 
 to increase the wealth of his mind, with the 
 acquisition of new conceptions and with the 
 knowledge of significant sounds. Yet the 
 
41 
 
 principal advantage which accrued to him 
 from this frequent intercourse with human 
 beings, was its tendency to awaken his mind 
 more and more to attention, to reflection and |[ 
 to active thought, accordingly as his self con- 
 sciousness became more clear. This, again, 
 rendered the want of communicating his 
 thoughts to others daily more perceptible to 
 him ; and thus, the instinctivel}? operative 
 and inventive teacher of languages within 
 him, was continually kept actively employed. 
 About a fortnight after Caspar's arrival in 
 Nuremberg, he was most providentially fa- 
 vored with a visit from the worthy professor 
 Daumer, an intelligent young scholar, who in 
 the kindly feelings of his humane heart dis- 
 covered a peculiar vocation, to devote him- 
 self to the mental development, education 
 and instruction of this unfortunate youth, — 
 as far as the eager importunity of curious 
 visitors and other impediments and interrup- 
 tions permitted him to do so. Caspar would 
 not have possessed so active a mind, so fer- 
 vent a zeal to lay hold on everything that 
 was new to him, so vivid, so youthfully pow- 
 erful, and so faithfullv retentive a memory, 
 4^ 
 
42 
 
 as, to the astonishment of all, he evinced, xf^ 
 with such assistance, he had not very soon 
 learned to speak, sufficiently, at least, in 
 some degree to express his thoughts. Yet, 
 his first attempts to speak remained for along 
 time a mere chopping of words, so miserably 
 defective and so awkwardly helpless, that it 
 was seldom possible to ascertain, with'^any 
 certainty, what he meant to express by the 
 fragments of speech which he jumbled to- 
 gether. Continuity of speech or consistency 
 of narration, was by no means to be expect- 
 ed from him ; and much was always left to 
 be supplied by the conjectures of the hearer* 
 To the burgermaster, Mr Binder, Caspar 
 was not only an object of deep interest, in as 
 far as his humane feeilngs were concerned, 
 but he claimed his particular attention in the 
 performance of his official duties as the head 
 of the police ; and to this most extraordinary 
 subject of police inquiry he devoted a very 
 large portion of his time and attention. It 
 was indeed sufficiently apparent, that the 
 every-day forms of official business were ill 
 adapted to this, by no means every-day oc- 
 
43 
 
 curi*etice }^ and that formal official mquirieiS 
 and examinations could not be expected to 
 throw any light whatsoever upon this mys- 
 tery. Mr Binder therefore very properly 
 chose, in the present case, to avoid the em- 
 barrassing restrictions of legal forms, by means 
 of extra-official proceedings. He caused 
 Caspar, almost every day, to be brought to 
 his house, and made him feel, as it were, at 
 home in his family. He conversed with him, 
 and made him talk as well as he could ; add 
 thus he endeavored, by frequently ques- 
 tioning and cross-questioning him to obtain 
 some information concerning the events of 
 his life, and his arrival It was in this 
 mannerj that Mr Binder at length succeed- 
 ed, or thought that he had succeeded, in 
 extracting from isolated answers and expres- 
 sions of Caspar, the materials of a histo^ 
 ry, which was, already, on the seventh of 
 
 * But then, the rash attempt ought ftot afterwards 
 to have been made, to give, at a later period, to trans- 
 actions which were only of a private nature, the ap- 
 parent form of official inquiries ; which gives to the 
 public documents appertaining to this case a very sin- 
 gular appearance. 
 
44 
 
 July the same year, given to the public, in 
 the form of an official promulgation.* This 
 promulgation — if we may call it so — con- 
 tains indeed, in many of its minute details, 
 which have too confidently been given with 
 unnecessary prolixity, much that is incredi- 
 ble and contradictory. Nor is it an easy 
 matter to discriminate, in every particular in- 
 stance, between what really appertains to the 
 person questioned, and what in fact belongs 
 to those who questioned him ; — between 
 what really flowed from Caspar's obscure re- 
 collections, and what, by dint of repeated 
 questions, may have been insinuated into his 
 mind, in such a manner, as to have been in- 
 voluntarily confounded by him with things 
 actually stored up in his memory. Many 
 incidents mentioned, may have been supplied, 
 or may at least have received a finish, from 
 the conjectures of others ; and the introduc- 
 tion of many, may even be owing to miscon- 
 ceptions, resulting from the impossibility of 
 always understanding what was meant by the 
 
 * It is this promulgatiou, which has hitherto served 
 for the foundation, upon which all accounts that have 
 hitherto heen given of Caspar in journals and pamphletf 
 have been made to rest. 
 
Xv^ 01 THE ^ 
 
 expressions of a half dumb hun5S^^mmal, so 
 very destitute, as Caspar was at that time, of 
 distinct conceptions of the most common ob- 
 jects and every-day occurrences of nature 
 and of life. Yet, upon the whole, that is, 
 as far as the principal and most essential facts 
 which it relates are concerned, this historical 
 narrative agrees perfectly with the contents 
 of a written memoir, which was afterwards 
 composed by Hauser himself, and sworn to 
 by him, before a court of justice, held for the 
 purpose of inquiring into this affair, in 1829 ; 
 as it also agrees, with what he has, on differ- 
 ent occasions, invariably related to the author 
 and to many other persons, precisely to the 
 same effect. The account which he gave 
 was as follows: 
 
 " He neither knows who he is, nor where 
 his home is. It was only at Nuremburg that 
 he came into the world.* Here he first 
 learnt that, besides himself and ' the man 
 with whom he had always been,' there ex- 
 
 * An expression which he often uses to designate 
 his exposure in Nuremburg, and his first awakening 
 to the consciousness of mental hfe. 
 
46 
 
 isted other men and other creatures. As 
 long as he can recollect he had always 
 lived in a hole, (a small low apartment 
 which he sometimes calls a cage,) where 
 he had always sat upon the ground, with 
 bare feet, and clothed only with a shirt 
 and a pair of breeches."*^ In his apart- 
 ment he never heard a sound, whether pro- 
 duced by a man, by an animal, or by any- 
 thing else. He never saw the heavens, nor 
 did there ever appear a brightening (day- 
 light) such as at Nuremberg. He never per- 
 ceived any difference between day and night, 
 and much less did he ever get a sight of the 
 beautiful lights in the heavens. When- 
 
 * According to a more particular account given by- 
 Caspar — which is fully confirmed by marks upon his 
 body which cannot be mistaken, by the singular forma- 
 tion of his knee and knee hollow, and by his peculiar 
 mode of sitting upon the ground with his legs extend- 
 ed which is possible to himself alone, — he never, 
 even in his sleep, lay with his whole body stretched 
 out, but sat, waking and sleeping, with his back sup- 
 ported in an erect posture. Some peculiar property 
 of his place of rest, and some particular contrivance 
 must probably have made it necessary for him to re- 
 main constantly in su ch a position. He is himself un- 
 able to give any further Information upon this sub- 
 ject. 
 
47 
 
 ever he awoke from sleep, he found a loaf 
 of bread and a pitcher of water by him. 
 Sometimes this water had a bad taste ; when- 
 ever this was the case, he could no longer 
 keep his, eyes open, but was compelled to 
 fall asleep ; * and, when he afterwards awoke, 
 he found that he had a clean shirt on, and 
 that his nails had been cut.f He never saf/ 
 the face of the man who brought him his 
 
 * That this water was mixed with opium may well 
 be supposed ; and. the certainty, that this was really 
 the fact, was fully proved on the following occasion. 
 After he had for some time lived with Professor Dau- 
 mer, his physician attempted to administer to him a 
 drop of opium in a glass of water. Caspar had scarcely 
 swallowed the first mouthful of this water, when he 
 said : " that water is nasty ; it tastes exactly like the 
 water I was sometimes obliged to drink in my cage." 
 
 t Hence, as well as from other circumstances, it is 
 evident, that Caspar was during his incarceration al- 
 ways treated with a certain degree of careful attention. 
 And this accounts for the attachment which he long 
 retained to the man " with whom he had always been." 
 This attachment ceasedj only at a very late period ; 
 yet, never to such a degree as to make him wish that 
 this man should be punished. He wished that those 
 should be punished by whose orders he had been con - 
 fined ; but he said, that that man had done him no 
 harm. 
 
48 
 
 meat and drink. In his hole he had two 
 wooden horses and several ribbons. With 
 these horses he had always amused himself 
 as long as he was awake ; and his only oc- 
 cupation was, to make them run by his side 
 and to fix or tie the ribbons about them in 
 different positions. Thus, one day had 
 passed as the other ; but he had never felt 
 the want of anything, had never been sick, 
 and — once only excepted — had never 
 felt the sensation of pain. Upon the whole, 
 he had been much happier there than in the 
 world, where he was obliged to suffer so 
 much. How long he had continued to live 
 in this situation he knew not ; for he had had 
 no knowledge of time. He knew not when, 
 or how he came there. Nor had he any 
 recollection of .ever having been in a differ- 
 ent situation, or in any other than in that 
 place. The man with whom he had always 
 been, never did him any harm. Yet one 
 day, shortly before he was taken away, — 
 when he had been running his horse too 
 hard, and had made too much noise, the man 
 came and struck him upon his arm with a 
 stick, or with a piece of wood ; this caused 
 
49 
 
 the wound which he brought with him to 
 Nuremberg." 
 
 " Pretty nearly about the same time, the 
 man once came into his prison, placed a small 
 table over his feet, and spread something white 
 upon it, which he now knows to have been 
 paper ; he then came behind him, so as not 
 to be seen by him, took hold of his hand, 
 and moved it backwards and forwards on the 
 paper, with a thing (a lead pencil) which he 
 had stuck between his fingers. He (Hau- 
 ser) was then ignorant of what it was 5 but 
 he was mightily pleased, when he saw the 
 black figures which began to appear upon 
 the white paper. When he felt that his hand 
 was free, and the man was gone from him, 
 he was so much pleased with this new dis- 
 covery, that he could neven grow tired of 
 drawing these figures repeatedly upon the 
 paper. This occupation almost made him 
 neglect his horses, although he did not know 
 what those characters signified. The man 
 repeated his visits in the same manner several 
 times."^ 
 
 * Of the fact that Caspar really had had instruction 
 and indeed regular elementary instruction in writing 
 5 
 
50 
 
 " Another tirae the man came again, lifted 
 him from the place where he lay, placed him 
 
 he gave evident proofs, immediately on the first morn- 
 ing after his arrival in Nuremberg. When the prison 
 keeper Hiltel came to him that morning, in the prison, 
 he gave him, in order to employ or to amuse him, a 
 sheet of paper with a lead pencil. Caspar seized 
 eagerly on both, placed the paper upon the bench and 
 began and continued to write, without intermission, 
 and without ever looking up or suffering himself to 
 be disturbed by anything that passed, until he had 
 filled the whole folio sheet, on all four sides, with his 
 writing. The appearance of this sheet, which has 
 been preserved and affixed to the documents furnished 
 by the police, is much the same as if Caspar, who 
 nevertheless wrote from memory, had had a copy ly- 
 ing before him, such as are commonly set before 
 children when they are first taught to write. For, 
 the writing upon this sheet consisted of rows of letters, 
 or rows of syllables ; so that, almost everywhere, the 
 same letter or the same syllable is constantly repeat- 
 ed. At the bottom of each page, all the letters of the 
 alphabet are also placed together, in the same order in 
 which they actually succeed each other, as is com- 
 monly the case in copies given to children ; and, in 
 another line, the numerical cyphers are placed, from 
 1 to 0, in their proper order. On one page of this 
 sheet, the name " Kaspar Hauser " is constantly re- 
 peated ; and, on the same sheet, the word reider 
 (Reuter, rider,) frequently occurs, yet this sheet also 
 proves, that Caspar had not progressed beyond the 
 first elements of writing. 
 
51 
 
 on his feet, and endeavored to teach him to 
 stand. This he repeated at several different 
 times. The manner in which he effected 
 this, was the following : he seized him firmly 
 around the breast, from behind ; placed his 
 feet behind Caspar's feet, and lifted these, 
 as in stepping forward." 
 
 '^ Finally, the man appeared once again, 
 placed Caspar's hands over his shoulders, 
 tied them fast, and thus, carried him on his 
 back out of the prison. He was carried up 
 (or down) a hill.* He knows not how he 
 felt ; all became night, and he was laid upon 
 his back.'' This " becoming night," as ap- 
 peared on many different occasions at Nu- 
 remberg signified, in Caspar's language, " to 
 faint away." The account given of the con- 
 tinuation of his journey, is principally con- 
 
 * It is evident, and other circumstances prove it to 
 be a fact, that Caspar could not yet, at that time, dis- 
 tinguish the motion of ascending from that of descend- 
 ing, or height from depth, even as to the impressions 
 made upon his own feelings ; and that he was conse- 
 quently still less able to designate this difference cor- 
 rectly by means of words. What Caspar calls a hill, 
 must in all probability have been a pair of stairs. Cas- 
 par also thinks he can recollect, that in being carried 
 he brushed against something by his side. 
 
52 
 
 fined to the following particulars : " that he 
 had often lain with his face to the ground, in 
 which cases it becanie night ; that he had 
 several times eaten bread and drunk water ; 
 that the man, " with whom he had always 
 been," had often taken pains to teach him to 
 walk, which always gave him great pain, &;c." 
 This man never spoke to him ; excepting, 
 that he continually repeated to him the words 
 " Renta wahn," &lc.* He (Caspar) never 
 saw the face of the man either on this journey 
 or ever before in prison. Whenever he led 
 him, he directed him to look down upon the 
 ground and at his feet, — an injunction which 
 he always strictly obeyed ; partly from fear, 
 and partly because his attention was suffi- 
 ciently occupied with his own person and the 
 position of his feet. Not long before he was 
 observed at Nuremberg, the man had put 
 the clothes upon him which he then wore. 
 
 The putting on of his boots gave him great 
 pain ; for the man made him sit on the ground, 
 seized him from behind, drew his feet up, 
 and thus forced them into the boots. They 
 
 * This jargon seems to imply •• I will be a rider (a 
 trooper) as my father was." 
 
53 
 
 then proceed onwards still more miserably 
 than before. He neither then, nor ever be- 
 fore, perceived anything of the objects around 
 him ; he neither observed nor saw them ; 
 and he could therefore not tell from what 
 part of the country, in what direction, or by 
 what road he came. All that he wa s con- 
 scious of, was that the man who had been lead- 
 ing him put the letter which he had brought 
 with him into his hand, and then vanished ; 
 after which, a citizen observed him and took 
 him to the guard-room at the new gate. 
 This history of the mysterious imprison- 
 ment and exposure of a young man, pre- 
 sents, not only a fearful, but a most singular 
 and obscure enigma ; which may indeed give 
 rise to innumerable questions and conjectures, 
 but, in respect to which, little can be said 
 with certainty ; and which, until its solution 
 shall have been found, must continue to re- 
 tain, in common with all enigmas, the pro- 
 perty of being enigmatical. Caspar's mental 
 condition during his dungeon life, must have 
 been that of a human being, immersed, in 
 his infancy, in a profound sleep, in which 
 he was not conscious even of a dream, or at 
 5* 
 
64 
 
 Ife^st of any succession of dreams. Me had 
 continued in this stupor, until, afrighted with 
 pain and apprehensions, he suddenly awoke^ 
 stunned with the wild and confused noised 
 and the unintelligible impressions of a Varie- 
 gated world) without knowing what had hap- 
 pened. Whoever should expect, that such a 
 being, when arrived at a full state of conscious* 
 ness, should be able to give a perfectly clear 
 and circumstantial historical description of 
 his slumbers and his dreamsj which should 
 satisfy the understandingj so as to remove 
 every doubt) would expect nothing lesSj than 
 that a sleeper should sleeping have been 
 awakC) or that a waking person should while 
 awake, have slept 
 
 There still exist certain regions in Ger-^ 
 tnany, to which, if a second Dupin were to 
 furnish maps depicting the illuminatioti of the 
 human mind in different countries) he would 
 give a coloring of dark gray, where occur-* 
 rences similar to those which Hauser has 
 related, are by no means unheard of. Dr 
 Horn"^ for instance, saw in the infifmary at 
 
 * In his travels through Germany. (S§.e Getting* 
 Bche gelehrte Anzeige. July, 1831. p. 1097.) 
 
56 
 
 Salzburg, but a few years ago, a girl of twenty- 
 two years of age and by no means ugly, who 
 had been brought up in a hogstye among the 
 hogs, and who had sat there for many years 
 with her legs crossed. One of her legs was 
 quite crookedj she grunted like a hog, and 
 her gestures were brutishly unseemly in a 
 human dress. In comparison with such 
 abominations, the crimes committed against 
 Caspar Hauser may even be considered as 
 acts in which the forbearance of humanity is 
 still visible. That Caspar should be unable 
 to give any account of the mode and manner 
 in which he was conveyed to Nuremberg, 
 or to furnish any recitals or descriptions of 
 the adventures of his journey, of the places 
 through which he passed, or of any of the 
 Usual occurrences which strike the attention 
 of travellers) whatever may be their mode of 
 conveyance, is so far from being astonishing, 
 that the case could not have been otherwise 
 without the intervention of a miracle. Even 
 if Caspar had before he left his prison awoke 
 to a state of clear and rational self-conscious- 
 ness ; if, like Sigismund in his tower, he had 
 by means of education and the cultivation of 
 
56 
 
 his mind attained to the maturity of a young 
 man; yet, the sudden transition from the 
 close confinement and gloomy obscurity of 
 his dungeon, could not have failed to throw 
 him either into fainting fits or into a state very 
 similar to that of excessive intoxication. 
 The unwonted impressions made by the ex- 
 ternal air must have stunned him, and the 
 bright sun-Hght blinded his eyes. Yet even 
 with seeing and unblinded eyes, he would 
 have seen nothing ; — at least he would have 
 observed and taken cognizance of nothing. 
 For nature, with all her phenomena, must 
 at that time have shone before his eyes, with 
 the glare of one confusedly diversified and 
 checkered mass, in which no single object 
 could be distinguished from another. That 
 this was really the case, even at Nuremberg, 
 was, as we shall see hereafter, confirmed in 
 the most unequivocal manner by actual ex- 
 perience. From what part of the country was 
 Caspar brought? upon what road, and through 
 which gate did he arrive ? was his journey 
 performed on foot, or in a carriage or a wag- 
 on ? To these and to similar questions, the 
 answers, even if they could be given with 
 
57 
 
 perfect certainty, would be such as would 
 interest rather the judge, who might be called 
 upon to examine and to decide, than the 
 public. Caspar himself, remembers only 
 his having walked ; without, however, being 
 able to add anything, which might lead to 
 probable conjectures concerning the time 
 consumed, or the length of the way passed 
 over, in walking. That he has no recollec- 
 tion of having rode in a carriage or wagon, 
 does not however prove that he may not 
 nevertheless, and perhaps for the greater part 
 of the way, have been thus conveyed. Cas- 
 par, sinks, even yet, whenever he rides in a 
 carriage or a wagon, into a kind of death 
 sleep, from which he does not easily awake, 
 whether the vehicle stops or rolls on ; and 
 in this state, how roughly soever it may be 
 done, he may be lifted up or laid down, and 
 packed or unpacked without his having the 
 least perception of it. When sleep has once 
 laid hold of him, no noise, no sound, no re- 
 port, no thunder is loud enough to wake him. 
 If Caspar — which from his own account ap- 
 pears probable — fainted away whenever he 
 was brought into the open air, if his con- 
 
58 
 
 ductors, for the sake of greater security, 
 made him drink some of the ill-tasted water 
 (opium diluted with water) ; they may, with 
 the greatest safety, have thrown him into a 
 wagon, and driven him many a day's journey, 
 without any fear of his awakening, crying out, 
 or occasioning his kidnappers the least in- 
 convenience. Mr Schmidt of Lubeck, has, 
 in his book Uber Kaspar Hauser (Altona, 
 1831,) given many ingenious reasons for his 
 conjecture, that Caspar was brought to Nu- 
 remberg from some place in its immediate 
 vicinity. For this, as well as for other con- 
 jectures, this history leaves ample room. 
 That the person by whom Caspar was brought 
 to Nuremberg, must have been one who was 
 well acquainted with Nuremberg and its lo- 
 cality, is certain ; and, that he must in former 
 times have served as a soldier in one of the 
 regiments stationed there, is at least highly 
 probable. 
 
 The crimes committed against Caspar 
 Hauser, as far as the information hitherto 
 given of them extends, are, judging accord- 
 ing to the criminal code of Bavaria, the fol- 
 lowing : 
 
59 
 
 1. The crime of illegal imprisonment : 
 (Strafgesetzbuch Thl. 1 Art. 1 92-695) which 
 was doubly aggravated, first, in respect to the 
 duration of the imprisonment, which appears 
 to have lasted from his earliest infancy to the 
 age of early manhood ; and secondly, in re- 
 spect to its kind, inasmuch as it was con- 
 nected with particular instances of ill-treat- 
 ment. As such, we must consider, not only 
 the brutish den and crippling position to which 
 he was confined, and his coarse diet, which 
 would scarcely have satisfied a dog, but we 
 must incontestably and indeed principally re- 
 gard as such, the cruel withholding from him, 
 of the most ordinary donations, which nature 
 with a liberal hand extends even to the most 
 indigent; —the depriving him of all the 
 means of mental development and culture, 
 — the unnatural detention of a human soul 
 in a state of irrational animality. With this 
 crime concurs, objectively — 
 
 II. The crime of exposure ; which, ac- 
 cording to Stgb. Thl. l,art. 174, may be com- 
 mitted not only in regard to infants, but also 
 in regard to grown up persons whom sickness 
 or other infirmities render unable to help 
 
60 
 
 themselves ; among which class of persons, 
 Caspar, on account of the state of animal stu- 
 pidity and of inability to see with his eyes 
 open or even to walk in an upright position 
 with safety, in which he then was, must un- 
 doubtedly be reckoned. The crime of Cas- 
 par's exposition is also aggravated by the con- 
 sideration of the danger to which it exposed 
 his life. His situation, both in respect to his 
 mind and his body, exposed him evidently 
 to the danger, either of falling into the river 
 Pzegnitz which was very near to the place 
 of his exposure, or of being run down by 
 carriages or horses. If a particular crime, af- 
 fecting the mental powers, or, as it might more 
 properly be designated, affecting the life of a 
 human soul, were known to the criminal code 
 of Bavaria ; this crime would, in forming a 
 juridical estimate of this case, when com- 
 pared with the crime of illegal imprisonment, 
 assume the place of the highest importance ; 
 nay, the latter crime would vanish in com- 
 parison with the first, as infinitely the greater 
 of the two, and it would be absorbed by it.* 
 
 * The conception that a crime may be absorbed by 
 he commission of a greater crime, is familiar to Ger- 
 
61 
 
 The deprivation of external liberty, though 
 in itself an irreparable injury, bears yet no 
 comparison with the injury done to this un- 
 happy being, by depriving him of the incalcu- 
 lable sum of inestimable benefits which can 
 never be restored to him, and which, by the 
 robbery committed upon his freedom, and 
 the mode and manner in which it was Com- 
 mitted, were either entirely withdrawn from 
 him, or destroyed, and his means of enjoying 
 them miserably crippled for the remainder of 
 his life. Such a crime does not merely af- 
 fect the external corporeal appearance of 
 man, but the inmost essence of his spiritual 
 being; it is the iniquity of a murderous rob- 
 bery perpetrated upon the very sanctuary of 
 his rational nature. When some authors 
 
 man writers on criminal jurisprudence. If a person 
 found guilty of petty larceny, were also found guilty 
 of murder, it is Evident, that the punishment of death 
 incurred by the second crime, would render it im- 
 possible to inflict the punishment of imprisonment in- 
 curred by the first ; which, by suspending his execu- 
 tion, would act rather as a reprieve than as a punish- 
 ment. The first crime would therefore remain un- 
 punished ; its punishment being as it were absorbed 
 by the punishment of the second crime. 
 6 
 
62 
 
 designate such a crime merely by the predi- 
 cate of a robbery of the intellect, (noochiria), 
 as Tittmann,* and make that which consti- 
 tutes the essential condition of its existence, 
 to consist in actually effecting a deprivation 
 of intellect, or in causing insanity ; Caspar 
 Hauser's case furnishes an instance, which 
 may convince them, that their conception of 
 this crime is far too limited, and, that a legis- 
 lator who should desire to render his system 
 more complete, by the exhibition of such a 
 genus of crimes, ought to assume a more 
 elevated and more extensive point of view. 
 The confinement which Caspar suffered in 
 his infancy, produced neither idiocy nor in- 
 sanity ; for, since the recovery of his liberty, 
 as we shall see more particularly hereafter, 
 he has emerged from the state of mere ani- 
 mality ; his mind has been developed, and 
 he may now, with certain limitations, be con- 
 sidered as a rational, intelligent, civilized and 
 moral man. Yet no one can help perceiving, 
 that it is the criminal invasion of the life of 
 
 ** Handbuch der Strafrechtswissenschaft. Thl. 1, 
 §179. 
 
63 
 
 his soul, — that it is the iniquity perpetrated 
 against the higher principles of his spiritual 
 nature, which presents the most revolting 
 aspect of the crime committed against him. 
 An attempt, by artificial contrivances to ex- 
 clude a man from nature and from all inter- 
 course with rational beings, to change the 
 course of his human destiny, and to with- 
 draw from him all the nourishment afforded 
 by those spiritual substances which nature has 
 appointed for food to the human mind, that 
 it may grow and flourish, and be instructed 
 and developed and formed; — such an at- 
 tempt must, considered even quite inde- 
 pendently of its actual consequences, be 
 considered as, in itself, a highly criminal 
 invasion of man's most sacred and most 
 peculiar property, — of the freedom and 
 the destiny of his soul. But above all, the 
 following consideration must be added to 
 all the rest. Caspar, having been sunk dur- 
 ing the whole earlier part of his life in animal 
 sleep, has passed through this extensive and 
 beautiful part of it, without having lived 
 through it. His existence was, during all 
 9 this time, similar to that of a person really 
 
64 
 
 dead : in having slept through his youthful 
 years, they have passed by him, without his 
 having had them in his possession ; because, 
 he was rendered unable to become conscious 
 of their existence. This chasm which crime 
 has torn in his life, cannot any more be filled 
 up 'y that time, in which he omitted to live, 
 can never be brought back, that it may yet 
 be lived through ; that juvenility, which fled 
 while his soul was asleep, can never be 
 overtaken. How long soever he may 
 live, he must forever remain a man with- 
 out childhood and boyhood ; a monstrous 
 being, who, contrary to the usual course 
 of nature, only began to live in the mid- 
 dle of his life. Inasmuch as the whole 
 earlier part of his life was thus taken from 
 him, he may be said to have been the sub- 
 ject of a partial soul murder. The deed 
 done to Caspar, differs from the crime that 
 would be committed by one who should 
 plunge a man of sound intellect, at a later 
 period, into a state of stupid idiocy, uncon- 
 sciousness, or irrationality, only in respect 
 to the different epoch of life at which the 
 blow of soul murder w^s struck : in one in- 
 
// v^ OF THB '- 
 
 {(uiTiyEEsri 
 
 Stance, the life of a human soul was mutila- 
 ted at its commencement ; in the other it 
 would be mutilated at its close. Besides, 
 one of the chief momenta, which ought not 
 to be overlooked, is this : since childhood 
 and boyhood are given and destined by na- 
 ture for the development and perfection of 
 our mental as well as our corporeal life, and 
 since nature overleaps nothing, the conse- 
 quence of Caspar's having come into the 
 world as a child at the age of early manhood 
 is, that the different states of life which in 
 other men are formed and developed gradu- 
 ally, have in him, both now and forever been 
 as it were displaced and improperly joined 
 together. Having commenced the life of 
 infancy at the age of physical maturity, he 
 will, throughout all his life, remain, as regards 
 his mind, less forward than his age, and as 
 regards his age, more forward than his mind. 
 Mental and physical life, which in the regular 
 course of their natural development go hand 
 in hand, have, therefore, in respect to Caspar, 
 been as it were separated, and placed in an 
 unnatural opposition with each other. Be- 
 cause he iUp through his childhood, that 
 6* 
 
66 
 
 childhood could not be lived through by him 
 at its proper time ; it therefore still remains 
 to be lived through by him ; and, it conse- 
 quently follows him into his later years, not 
 as a smiling genius, but as an affrighting 
 spectre, which is constantly intruding upon 
 him at an unseasonable hour. If, besides 
 all this, we take into consideration the de- 
 vastation which the fate of his earlier youth 
 as will more fully be seen hereafter, has 
 occasioned in his mind ; it must appear evi- 
 dent, from the instance here given, that the 
 conception of a robbery committed upon the 
 intellect, does by no means exhaust the con- 
 ception of a crime committed against the life 
 of the soul. 
 
 What other crimes may perhaps yet lie 
 concealed under the iniquity committed 
 against Caspar ? What were the ends which 
 Hauser's secret imprisonment was intended 
 to subserve? — To answer these questions, 
 would lead us too far either into the airy re- 
 gions of conjecture or within certain confines 
 which will not admit of such an exposure to 
 the light. 
 
 This crime, which in the history of human 
 
67 
 
 atrocilies is still almost unheard of, presents 
 to the learned judge, as well as to the juri- 
 dical physician^ yet another very remarkable 
 aspect. Scrutinies and judgments concern- 
 ing certain states of mind, regard commonly 
 only the criminal himself ; inasmuch as their 
 only end, is to ascertain, whether his actions 
 are imputable to him or not. But here, an 
 instance is given of a most extraordinary, and 
 in its kind exclusively singular case, in which 
 the matter of fact which is to prove the ex- 
 istence of a crime, lies almost entirely con- 
 cealed within a human soul ; where it can 
 be investigated and established, only by means 
 of inquiries purely psychological, and found- 
 ed upon observations, indicating certain states 
 of the thinking and sentient mind of the per- 
 son injured. Even of the history of this 
 deed, we have as yet no other knowledge, 
 than that which we have received from the 
 narration given of it by him to whom it was 
 done : yet, the truth of this narration is war- 
 ranted by the personality of the narrator him- 
 self ; upon whose thinking and sentient mind 
 (Geist und gemiith) — as we shall see more 
 particularly hereafter — the deed itself, is 
 
68 
 
 written in visible and legible characters. No 
 other being than one who has experienced 
 and suffered what Caspar has, can be what 
 Caspar is ; and he whose being indicates 
 what Caspar's does, must have lived in a 
 state such as that in which Caspar says that 
 he lived. And thus we see an instance, in 
 which our estimation of the degree of credit 
 which we are to give to the narrator of an 
 almost incredible occurrence, is made to rest 
 almost altogether upon psychological grounds. 
 But, the evidence furnished in this instance 
 upon such grounds, outweighs that of any 
 other proof. Witnesses may lie, documents 
 may be falsified ; but no other human being, 
 except indeed he were a magician armed 
 with a certain portion of omnipotence and 
 omniscience, is able to produce a lie of such 
 a nature, that, in which soever aspect you 
 may present it to the light, it shall appear, 
 in all of them, as the purest and most uncon- 
 taminated truth, as the very personification 
 of truth itself. Whoever should doubt Cas- 
 par's narration, must doubt Caspar's person. 
 But, such a sceptic might with equal reason 
 be perniitted to doubt, whether a person, 
 
69 
 
 bleeding from a hundred wounds, and con- 
 vulsed before his eyes with the agonies of 
 death, was really a wounded and dying man, 
 or was only acting the part of a wounded and 
 dying man. Yet we must not anticipate the 
 reader's judgment ; my exhibition of Caspar's 
 person has only just commenced. 
 
CHAPTER V. 
 
 Caspar had been already considerably- 
 more than a month at Nuremberg, when, 
 among the latest novelties of the day, I heard 
 of this foundling. No official accounts of 
 this occurrence had yet been received by the 
 highest authorities of the province ; it was 
 therefore only as a private individual, and 
 from a general regard to the interests of hu- 
 manity and of science, that I went to Nurem- 
 berg on the 11th of July, 1828, in order to 
 examine this most extraordinary and singular 
 phenomenon. Caspar's abode was at that 
 time still in the Luginsland at the Vestner 
 gate, where every body was admitted who 
 desired to see him. In fact, from morning 
 to night, Caspar attracted scarcely fewer 
 visitors than the kangaroo, or the tame 
 hyena in the celebrated menagerie of M. von 
 Aken. I therefore also proceeded thither, 
 
71 
 
 in company with Col. von D, two ladies 
 
 and two children ; and we fortunately arrived 
 there at an hour when no other visitors hap- 
 pened to be present. Caspar's abode was in 
 a small but cleanly and light room, the win- 
 dows of which opened upon an Extensive and 
 pleasant prospect. We found him with his 
 feet bare, clothed, besides his shirt, only with 
 a pair of old trousers. The walls of his cham- 
 ber had been decorated by Caspar as high 
 as he could reach, with sheets of colored pic- 
 tures. He stuck them to the wall, every 
 morning anew, with his saliva, which was, 
 at that time, as tough as glue ;* and, as soon 
 as it became twilight, he took them down 
 again, and laid them together by his side. 
 In a corner of the fixed bench which extend- 
 ed around the room was his bed, which con- 
 sisted of a bag of straw, with a pillow and 
 blanket. The whole of the remaining part 
 of the bench was thickly covered with a va- 
 riety of playthings^ with hundreds of leaden 
 
 * The saliva was so very gluey, that in taking these 
 sheets down parts of them sometimes adhered to the 
 wall and sometimes parts of the plastering of the wall 
 adhered to the paper. 
 
72 
 
 soldiers, wooden dogs, horses, and other toyy, 
 such as are commonly manufactured at Nu- 
 remberg. They had already ceased to 
 occupy much of his attention during the day ; 
 yet he was at no little trouble to gather care- 
 fully together all these trifles and all their 
 trifling appurtenances, every evening ; to 
 unpack them, as soon as he awoke, and to 
 place them in a certain order, in rows along- 
 side of each other. The benevolent feelings 
 of the kind inhabitants of Nuremberg had 
 also induced them to present him with vari- 
 ous articles of wearing apparel, which he kept 
 under his pillow, and displayed to us with a 
 childish pleasure not unmingled with some 
 little vanity. Upon the bench there lay, 
 mingled with these playthings, several pieces 
 of money, to which, however, he paid no 
 attention. From these, I took a soiled crown 
 piece, and a quite new piece of twentyfour 
 kreutzers * in my hand and asked him, 
 which of these be liked best ? He chose the 
 
 * A crown piece, is about the size of a Spanish dol- 
 lar, and a piece of twentyfour kreutzers about the size 
 of a (quarter of a dollar. 
 
73 
 
 small shining one ; he said the larger one was 
 ugly, and he regarded it with a look ex- 
 pressive of aversion. When I endeavored 
 to make him understand, that the larger piece 
 was nevertheless the more valuable of the 
 two, and that he could get more pretty things 
 for it than for the smaller one, he listened 
 indeed attentively, and assumed for some- 
 time a thoughtful stare; but at length he 
 told me, that he did not know what I meant. 
 When we entered into his apartment, he 
 showed nothing like shyness or timidity ; on 
 the contrary, he met us with confidence and 
 seemed to be rejoiced at our visit. He first 
 of all noticed the Colonel's bright uniform, 
 and he could not cease to admire his helmet, 
 which glittered with gold ; then the colored 
 dresses of the ladies attracted his attention ; 
 as for myself, being dressed in a modest 
 black frock coat, I was at first scarcely hon- 
 ored with a single glance. Each of us 
 placed himself separately before him and 
 mentioned to him his name and tide. When- 
 ever any person was thus introduced, Caspar 
 went up very close to him, regarded him 
 with a sharp staring look, noticed every par- 
 7 
 
74 
 
 ticular part of his face, as his forehead, eyes, 
 nose, mouth, chin, &.c, successively, with a 
 penetrating rapid glance, and as I could dis- 
 tinctly perceive, at the very last, he collect- 
 ed all the different parts of the countenance 
 vi^hich at first he had gathered separately and 
 piece by piece, into one whole. He then 
 repeated the name of the person, as it had 
 been mentioned to him. And now, he knew 
 the person ; and, as experience afterwards 
 proved, he knew him forever. He averted 
 his eyes, as much as possible, from every 
 glare of light ; and he most carefully avoid- 
 led the rays of the sun which entered direct- 
 ly through the window. When such a ray 
 accidentally struck his eye, he winked very 
 much, wrinkled his forehead, and evidently 
 showed that he was in pain. His eyes were 
 also much inflamed, and he betrayed in every 
 respect the greatest sensibility of the effects 
 of light. 
 
 Although his face became afterwards per- 
 fectly regular, yet, at that time, a striking 
 difference was perceptible between the left 
 and the right side of it. The first was per- 
 ceptibly drawn awry and distorted; and con- 
 vulsive spasms frequently passed over it like 
 
75 
 
 flashes of lightning. By these spasms the 
 whole left side of his body, and particularly 
 his arm and hand, were visibly affected. 
 
 If anything was shown him which excited 
 his curiosity, if any word was spoken which 
 struck his attention or was unintelligible to 
 him, these spasms immediately made their 
 appearance ; and they were generally suc- 
 ceeded by a kind of nervous rigidity. He 
 then stood motionless ; not a muscle of his 
 face moved, his eyes remained wide open 
 without winking, and assumed a lifeless 
 stare ; he appeared like a statue, to be un- 
 able to see, to hear, or to be excited to any 
 living movement by external impressions. 
 This state was observable whenever he was 
 meditating upon anything, whenever he was 
 seeking the conception corresponding to any 
 new word, or the word corresponding to any 
 new thing, or whenever he endeavored to 
 connect anything that was unknown to him 
 with something that he knew, in order to ren- 
 der the first conceivable to him by means of 
 the latter. 
 
 His annunciation of words which he knew, 
 was plain and determinate, without hesitating 
 
76 
 
 or stammering. But coherent speech was 
 not yet to be expected from him, and his 
 language was as indigent as his stock of ideas. 
 It was therefore also extremely difficult to 
 become intelligible to him. Scarcely had 
 you uttered a few sentences which he appear- 
 ed to understand, when you found that some- 
 thing was mingled with them which was 
 \ foreign to him ; and, if he wished to under- 
 stand it, his spasms immediately returned. 
 In all that he said, the conjunctions, partici- 
 ples and adverbs were still almost entirely 
 wanting ; his conjugation embraced little 
 more than the infinitive; and he was most 
 of all deficient in respect to his syntax, 
 which was in a state of miserable confusion. 
 " Caspar very well," instead of I am very 
 well ; '^ Caspar shall July tell," instead of, I 
 shall tell it to Julius (the son of the prison 
 keeper); such were his common modes of 
 expressing himself. The pronoun I occurred 
 very rarely ; he generally spoke of himself 
 in the third person, calling himself Caspar. 
 In the same manner, he also spoke to others 
 in the third person instead of the second ; for 
 instance, in speaking to a colonel or a lady, 
 
77 
 
 instead of saying you, he would say colonel 
 or lady such a one, using the verb in the 
 third person. Thus also, in speaking to him, 
 if you wished him immediately to understand 
 who you meant, you must not say you to him, 
 but Caspar. The same word was often used 
 by h m in different significations; which often 
 occasioned ludicrous mistakes. Many words 
 which signify only a particular species, would 
 be applied by him to the whole genus. Thus, 
 for instance, he would use the word hill or 
 mountain, as if it applied to every protube- 
 rance or elevation ; and in consequence there- 
 of, he once called a corpulent gentleman, 
 whose name he could not recollect, " the man 
 with the great mountain," A lady, the end 
 of whose shawl he once saw dragging on the 
 floor, he called, ** the lady with the beautiful 
 tail." 
 
 It may be supposed, that I did not omit, 
 by various questions, to obtain from him 
 some account of his past life. But all that 
 I could draw from him was so confused and 
 so undeterminate a jargon, that, being yet 
 unaccustomed to his manner of speaking, I 
 could mostly only guess what he meant, while 
 7* 
 
78 
 
 much remained that was utterly unintelligible 
 to me. 
 
 It appeared to me not unimportant to make 
 some trial of his taste in respect to different 
 colors ; he showed that, also in this particu- 
 lar, he was of the same mind as children 
 and so-called savages. The red color, and 
 indeed the most glaring red, was preferred 
 by him to every other ; the yellow he dis- 
 liked, excepting when it struck the sight as 
 shining gold, in which case his choice waver- 
 ed between this yellow and the glaring red ; 
 white was indifferent to him, but green ap- 
 peared to him almost as detestable as black. 
 This taste, and particularly his predilection 
 for the red color, he retained, as professor 
 Daumer's later observations prove, long after 
 the cultivation of his mind had very consid- 
 erably progressed. If the choice had been 
 given him, he would have clothed himself 
 and all for whom he had a regard, from head 
 to foot in scarlet or purple. The appear- 
 ance of nature, green being the principal 
 color of her garment, gave him no delight. 
 She could appear beautiful to him, only 
 when viewed through a red colored glass. 
 
79 
 
 With professor Daumer's dwelling, to which 
 shortly after my visit he was removed from 
 the Lunginsland, he was not much pleased ; 
 because, the only prospect that he had there, 
 was into the garden, where he saw nothing 
 but ugly trees and plants, as he called them. 
 On the contrary, he was particularly pleased 
 with the dwelling of one of his preceptor's 
 friends, which was situated in a narrow un- 
 pleasant street, because opposite to it and 
 round about it nothing was to be seen but 
 houses beautifully painted red. When a tree, 
 full of red apples was shown him, he ex- 
 pressed moch satisfaction at seeing it; yet 
 he thought that it would have been still much 
 more beautiful, if its leaves also were as red 
 as the fruit. Seeing a person once drinking 
 red wine, he expressed a wish that he, who 
 drank nothing but water, could also drink 
 things which appeared so beautiful. 
 
 There was but one advantage more which 
 he wished that his favorite animals, horses, 
 possessed. It was, that, instead of being 
 black, bay, or white, their color were scar- 
 let. The curiosity, the thirst for knowledge, 
 and the inflexible perseverance with which 
 
-> 
 
 80 
 
 he fixed his attention to anything that he was 
 determined to learn or comprehend, surpass- 
 ed everything that can be conceived of them ; 
 and the manner in which they were express- 
 ed, was truly affecting. It has already been 
 stated, that he no longer employed himself 
 in the day-time with his playthings; his 
 hours throughout the day were successively 
 occupied with writing, with drawing, or with 
 other instructive employments in which pro- 
 fessor Daumer engaged him. Bitterly did 
 he complain to us, that the great number of 
 people who visited him left him no time to 
 learn anything. It was very affecting to hear 
 his often repeated lamentation that the peo- 
 ple in the world knew so much, and that 
 there were so very many things which he 
 had not yet learnt. Next to writing, draw- 
 ing was his favorite occupation, for which 
 he evinced a great capacity joined with 
 equal perseverance. For several days past, 
 he had undertaken the task of copying a 
 lithographical print of the burghermaster Bin- 
 der. A large packet of quarter sheets had 
 already been filled with the copies which he 
 had drawn ; they were arranged in a long 
 
81 
 
 series, in the order in which they had been 
 produced. I examined each of them sepa- 
 rately : the first attempts resembled exacdy 
 the pictures drawn by little children, who 
 imagine that they have drawn a face, when 
 they have scratched upon the paper, some- 
 thing meant to represent an oval figure with 
 a few long and cross strokes. Yet, in al- 
 most every one of the succeeding attempts, 
 some improvements were distinctly visible ; 
 so that these lines began more and more to 
 resemble a human countenance, and finally 
 represented the original, though still in a 
 crude and imperfect manner, yet so that their 
 resemblance to it might be recognised. I 
 expressed my approbation of some of his last 
 attempts; but he showed that he was not 
 satisfied, and insinuated that he should be 
 obliged to draw the picture a great many 
 times, before it would be drawn as it ought 
 to be, and then he would make it a present 
 to the burghermaster. 
 
 With his life in the world, he appeared 
 to be by no means satisfied ; he longed to go 
 back to the man with whom he had always 
 been. At home, (in his hole,) he said, he 
 
83 
 
 had never suffered so much from headache, 
 and had never been so much teazed as since 
 he was in the world. By this, be alluded to 
 the unpleasant and painful sensations which 
 were occasioned by the many new impres- 
 sions to which he was totally unaccustomed, 
 and by a great variety of smells which were 
 disagreeable to him, he ; as well as to the 
 numerous visits of those who came to see 
 him from curiosity, to their incessant ques- 
 tioning of him, and to some of their inconsid- 
 erate and not very humane experiments. 
 He had therefore no fault to find with the 
 man with whom he had always been, except 
 that he had not yet come to take him back 
 again, and that he had never shown him or 
 told him anything of so many beautiful things, 
 which are in the world. He is willing to re- 
 main in Nuremberg, until he has learnt what 
 the burghermaster and the professor (Dau- 
 mer) know ; but then, the burghernrj aster 
 must take him home ; and then he will show 
 the man what he has learnt in the meantime. 
 When I expressed my surprise, that he 
 should wish to return to that abominable bad 
 man; he replied, with mild indignation, " man 
 
83 
 
 not bad, man me no bad done." Of his 
 astonishing memory, which is as quick as it 
 is tenacious, he gave us the most striking 
 proofs. In noticing any of the numerous 
 things whether small or great which were in 
 his possession, he was able to mention the 
 name and the title of the person who had 
 given it to him ; and if several persons were 
 to be mentioned, whose surnames were alike, 
 he distinguished them accurately, by their 
 christian names or by other marks of distinc- 
 tion. About an hour after we had seen him, 
 we met him again in the street, it being about 
 the time when he was conducted to the 
 burghermaster's. We addressed him ; and 
 when we asked him whether he could recol- 
 lect our names? he mentioned, without the 
 least hesitation, the full name of every one 
 of the company, together with all our titles, 
 which must nevertheless have appeared to 
 him as unintelligible nonsense. His physi- 
 cian, Dr Osterhausen observed, on a different 
 occasion, that when a nosegay had been given 
 him and he had been told the names of all 
 the different flowers of which it was com- 
 posed, he recognised, several days afterwards, 
 
' 34 
 
 every one of these flowers ; and he was able 
 to tell the name of each of them. But the 
 strength of his memory decreased afterwards, 
 precisely in proportion as it was enriched, 
 and as the labor of his understanding was 
 increased. His obedience to all those per- 
 sons who had acquired paternal authority over 
 him, particularly to the burghermaster, pro- 
 fessor Daumer, and the prison-keeper Hiltel, 
 was unconditional and boundless. That the 
 burghermaster or the professor had said so, 
 was to him a reason for doing or omitting to 
 do anything, which was final and totally ex- 
 clusive of all further questions and considera- 
 tions. When once I asked him, why he thought 
 himself obliged always to yield such punctual 
 obedience ? he replied : " the man with 
 whom I always was, taught me that 1 must 
 do as I am bidden." Yet in his opinion, this 
 submission to the authority of others, refer- 
 ed only to what he was to do or not to do, 
 and it had no connexion whatever with his 
 knowing, believing, and opining. Before 
 he could acknowledge anything to be certain 
 and true, it was necessary that he should be 
 convinced ; and, indeed, that he should be 
 
85 
 
 convinced either by the intuition of his senses, 
 or by some reasoning adapted to his powers 
 of comprehension and to the scanty acquire- 
 ments of his almost vacant mind, as to ap- 
 pear to him to be striking. Whenever it was 
 impossible to reach his understanding by any 
 of these ways, he did not indeed contradict 
 the assertion made, but he would leave the 
 matter undecided, until, as he used to say, 
 he had learned more. I spoke to him among 
 other things of the impending winter, and I 
 told him that the roofs of the houses and 
 the streets of the city would then be all 
 white, — as wliite as the walls of his cham- 
 ber. He said, that this would be very pret- 
 ty ; but he plainly insinuated that he should 
 not believe it before he had seen it. The 
 next winter, when the first snow fell, he ex- 
 pressed great joy that the streets, the roofs 
 and the trees had now been so well painted ; 
 and he went quickly down into the yard, to 
 fetch some of the white paint ; but he soon 
 ran to his preceptor with all his fingers stretch- 
 ed out, crying, and blubbering, and bawling 
 out " that the white paint had bit his hand." 
 A most surprising and inexplicable pro- 
 8 
 
86 
 
 perty of this young man, was his love of 
 order and cleanliness, which he even carried 
 to the extreme of pedantry. Of the many 
 hundreds of trifles of which his little house- 
 hold consisted, each had its appropriate 
 place, was properly packed, carefully folded, 
 symmetrically arranged, &£c. Uncleanliness, 
 or whatever he considered as such, whether 
 in his own person or in others, was an abom- 
 ination to him. He observed almost every 
 grain of dust upon our clothes ; and when 
 he once saw a few grains of snufF on my 
 frill, he showed them to me, briskly indicat- 
 ing that he wished me to wipe those nasty 
 things away. 
 
 The most remarkable fact of experience 
 in respect to him which I learnt, but which 
 was not fully explained to me until several 
 years afterwards, was the result of the follow- 
 ing experiment, which was suggested to me 
 by a very obvious association of ideas, lead- 
 ing me to compare what was observable in 
 Caspar, who had not come forth from his 
 dark dungeon to the light of day before the 
 age of early manhood, wiih the well known 
 account, given by Cheselden, of a young 
 
87 
 
 man, who had become blind but a few days 
 after his birth, and who, in consequence of 
 a successful operation, had been restored to 
 sight, nearly at the same age. 
 
 I directed Caspar to look out of the win- 
 dow, pointing to the wide and extensive pros- 
 pect of a beautiful landscape, that presented 
 itself to us in all the glory of summer ; and 
 I asked him, whether what he saw was not 
 very beautiful. He obeyed ; but he instant- 
 ly drew back with visible horror, exclaiming 
 " ugly! ugly! " and then, pointing to the white 
 wall of his chamber, he said, " there not 
 ugly." To my question, why it was ugly ? 
 No other reply was made, than ugly ! ugly ! 
 and thus, nothing remained for the present 
 for me to do, but to take care to preserve 
 this circumstance in my memory, and to ex- 
 pect its explanation from the time, when Cas- 
 par should be better able to express what he 
 meant to say. That his turning away from 
 the prospect pointed at^ could not be suffi- 
 ciently accounted for, by the painful impres- 
 sion made upon his optic nerve by the light, 
 appeared to me to be evident. For his 
 countenance at this time did not so much 
 
88 
 
 express pain as horror and dismay. Besides, 
 he stood at some distance from the window, 
 by the side of it, so that akhoiigh he could 
 see the prospect pointed at, yet, in looking at 
 it he could not be exposed to the impression 
 made by rays of light entering directly into 
 the window. When Caspar afterwards in 
 1831, spent some weeks with me at my own 
 house, where I had continual opportunities 
 of observing him accurately, and of com- 
 pleting and correcting the results of former 
 observations, I took an opportunity of con- 
 versing with him respecting this occurrence. 
 I asked him whether he remembered my 
 visit to him at the tower ; and whether he 
 could particularly recollect the circumstance, 
 that I had asked him how he liked the 
 prospect from his window, and that he had 
 turned from it with horror, and had repeat- 
 edly exclaimed ugly ! ugly ! and I then asked 
 him, why he had done so ? and what had 
 then . appeared to him. To which he re- 
 plied ; " yes, indeed, what I then saw was 
 very ugly. For when I looked at the window 
 it always appeared to me, as if a window 
 shutter had been placed close before my eyes 
 
89 
 
 upon which a wall painter had spattered the 
 contents of his different brushes, filled with 
 white, blue, green, yellow, and red paint, all 
 mingled together. Single things as I now 
 see things, 1 could not at that time recog- 
 nise and distinguish from each other. This 
 was shocking to look at; and besides, it 
 made me feel anxious and uneasy ; because 
 it appeared to me, as if my window had been 
 closed up with this parti-colored shutter, in 
 order to prevent me from looking out into 
 the open air. That, what I then saw, were 
 fields, hills, and houses ; that many things 
 which at that time appeared to me much 
 larger were in fact much smaller, while many 
 other things that appeared smaller, were in 
 reality larger than other things, is a fact; of 
 which I was afterwards convinced by the 
 experience gained during my walks ; at length 
 I no longer saw anything more of the shutter." 
 To other questions, he replied, " that, in the 
 beginning, he could not distinguish between 
 what was really round or triangular, and 
 what was only painted as round or triangular. 
 The men and horses represented on sheets 
 of pictures, appeared to him precisely as the 
 8* 
 
90 
 
 men and horses that were carved in wood ; 
 the first, as round as the latter, or these, as 
 flat as those. But he said, ihat in the pack- 
 ing and unpacking of his things, he had soon 
 felt a difference ; and that, afterwards, it had 
 seldom happened to him, to mistake the one 
 for the other. 
 
 Here then we behold, in Caspar, a living 
 instance of Cheselden's blind man who had 
 recovered his sight. Let us hear what Vol- 
 taire,'^ or Diderot,f who in this instance 
 may pass for the same person, has said of 
 this blind person J " The young man whose 
 cataracts were couched by this skilful sur- 
 geon, did not for a long time distinguish either 
 magnitudes, distances, or even figures from 
 each other. An object of an inch in size, 
 which, when placed before his eyes, concealed 
 a house from his view, appeared to him as 
 
 * In his Philosophie de Newton (Oeuvres completes 
 Gotha, 1786, T. xxxi. p. 118.) 
 
 t Lettre sur les arengles k Tusage de ceux qui voyent 
 (Londres 149) p. 1759 — 164. Diderot has copied 
 Voltaire's account verbatim. 
 
 t The author was unable to obtain Cheselden's ori- 
 ginal work. 
 
91 
 
 large as that house. All objects were pre- 
 sent to his eye, and appeared to him to be 
 applied to that organ, as objects of touch are 
 applied to the skin. He could not distin- 
 guish, by his sight, what by the aid of his 
 hands he had judged to be round from what 
 he had judged to be angular ; nor could he 
 by means of his eyes discern, whether what 
 by his feelings he had perceived to be above 
 or below, was in fact above or below. He 
 attained, though not without some difficulty, 
 to a perception, that his house was larger 
 than his chamber ; but he could never con- 
 ceive, how the eye could give him this infor- 
 mation. Many repeated facts of experience, 
 were required in order to satisfy him that 
 paintings represented solid bodies; and when, 
 by dint of looking at pictures, he was con- 
 vinced that what he saw before him were not 
 merely surfaces, he felt them with his hands, 
 and was then much surprised, to find only a 
 plain surface without any projection. He 
 then would ask which of his senses deceived 
 him, his touch or his sight ? Painting has, 
 however, sometimes produced the same effect 
 upon savages, the first time that they saw it : 
 
92 
 
 th ey took painted figures for living men, in- 
 terrogated them, and were quite astonished 
 to find that they received no answer; — an 
 error, which in them could certainly not have 
 proceeded from their being unaccustomed to 
 the sight of visible objects." 
 
 To little children also, during the first 
 weeks or months after their birth, everything 
 appears equally near. They will extend their 
 little hands to reach the glittering ball of a 
 distant steeple, and they know neither how 
 to distinguish things that are actually great or 
 small, from things that are apparently so, nor 
 how to distinguish real, from painted objects. 
 For in respect to objects both of the sight and 
 of the touch, it is necessary, that both of these 
 senses should mutually assist each other, in 
 order to enable us to recognise them for 
 what they really are. The explanation of 
 this fact of experience depends upon the 
 elementary law of all vision ; regarding which 
 the great English philosopher Berkley has ex- 
 pressed himself in the following manner : " It 
 is, I think, agreed by all, that distance of it- 
 self, and immediately, cannot be seen. For 
 distance being a line, directed end-wise to the 
 
93 
 
 eye, it projects only one point at the bottom 
 of the eye. Which point remains invariably 
 the same, whether the distance be longer or 
 shorter. — I find it also acknowledged that 
 the estimate we make of the distance of ob- 
 jects considerably remote, is rather an act of 
 judgment grounded on experience, than of 
 sense. For example: when I perceive a 
 great number of intermediate objects, such 
 as houses, fields, rivers, and the like, which 
 I have experienced to take up a considerable 
 space ; I thence form a judgment or con- 
 clusion, that the object I see beyond them is 
 at a great distance. Again, when an object 
 appears faint and small, which at a near dis- 
 tance I have experienced to make a vigorous 
 and large appearance, I instantly conclude 
 that it is far oflT. And this, it is evident, is 
 the result of experience; without which, 
 from the faintness and littleness, I should not 
 have inferred anything concerning the dis- 
 tance of objects. 
 
 The application of this law of optics, and 
 of those facts, in explaining the delusion of 
 the senses which Caspar experienced is ob- 
 vious. As Caspar had never before been 
 
94 
 
 accustomed to walk further, than from the 
 tower to the biirghermaster's house, or per- 
 haps through one or two streets more 5 as, 
 in consequence of the irritability of his eyes, 
 and of his fear of falling, he always looked 
 down at his feet, and as, on account of his 
 sensibility of the light, he always avoided 
 looking out into the vast ocean of light around 
 him; he had, for a length of time, no oppor- 
 tunities of gaining experience concerning the 
 perspective and the distances of visible ob- 
 jects. All the numerous things in the coun- 
 try at which he was looking, which, together 
 with a comparatively s mall portion of the blue 
 iky filled the aperture between the upper 
 and lower window frame, must, therefore, 
 have presented themselves to him as a great 
 variety of formless and equally distant phe- 
 nomena, arranged the one above the other. 
 Hence the whole must have been viewed by 
 him, as an upright table, upon which nume- 
 rous and differently colored objects of dif- 
 ferent sizes, had assumed the appearance of 
 shapeless and parti-colored blots. 
 
CHAPTER VI. 
 
 Though Caspar Hauser's almost constant 
 and uninterupted intercourse with the nu- 
 merous individuals, who thronged to him at 
 all hours of the day, was unquestionably at- 
 tended with the advantage of making him 
 acquainted, in a short and easy manner, with 
 a great variety of things and words, and of 
 thus enabling him to make a very rapid pro- 
 gress in learning how to speak with others 
 and to understand them ; yet it is equally 
 certain, that the heterogeneous influence of 
 mingled masses of individuals to which he 
 was thus constantly exposed, was by no 
 means well adapted to promote an orderly 
 development of this neglected youth, in agree- 
 ment with the regular course of nature. It 
 is true, that perhaps not an hour of the day 
 was permitted to pass, which did not in some 
 way or other furnish new materials for the 
 formation of his mind. But, it was impossi- 
 
96 
 
 ble for the materials thus collected to assume 
 the form and figure even of the most incon- 
 siderable organic whole. All was mingled 
 together in one, disorderly, scattered, and 
 parti-colored mass, of hundreds and thousands 
 of partial representations and fragments of 
 thought, huddled together, above and be- 
 low, and by the sides of each other, without 
 any apparent connexion or design. If thus 
 the vacant tablets of his mind were soon 
 enough superscribed, they were, at the 
 same time, but too soon filled and disfigured 
 with things, which in part at least were worth- 
 less and prejudicial. The unaccustomed im- 
 pressions of the light and of the free air ; the 
 strange and often painful minglings of di- 
 verse excitatives which continually flowed 
 in upon his senses ; the effort to which his 
 mind was constantly stimulated by his thirst 
 of knowledge, laboring as it were to go be- 
 yond itself, to fasten upon, to devour and to 
 absorb into itself whatsoever was new to him, 
 — but all was new to him — all this was 
 more than his feeble body, and his delicate, 
 yet constantly excited and even over excited 
 nerves could bear. From my first visit to 
 
^7 
 
 Caspar on the 11th of July, I brought with 
 me the fullest conviction, which in its proper 
 place I also endeavored to impress upon the 
 minds of others, that Caspar Hauser must 
 needs either die of a nervous fever, or be 
 visited with some attack of insanity or idiocy, 
 if some change was not speedily made in his 
 situation. In a few days my apprehensions 
 were partly justified by what actually occur- 
 red. Caspar Hauser became sick: at least 
 he became so unwell, that a dangerous illness 
 was feared. The official statement of his 
 physician, Dr Oslerhausen's opinion, which 
 on this occasion was sent by him to the ma- 
 gistracy of the city, was to the following 
 effect. ^ 
 
 " The multifarious impressions which all at 
 once rushed upon Caspar Hauser after he 
 had for years been buried alive in a dungeon, 
 where he lived secluded from all mankind 
 and left, to himself alone, and which did not 
 operate upon him singly and successively, but 
 in a mass and altogether ; the heteroge- 
 neous impressions made upon him by the free 
 air, by the light, and by the objects which 
 surrounded him, which all of them were new 
 9 
 
98 
 
 to him ; the awakening of his mental indi- 
 viduality, his desire of learning and of know- 
 ing, as well as the change that was made in 
 his manner of living, &;c ; the operation of 
 all these causes, could not but produce effects 
 which would powerfully shake, and finally 
 injure the health of a person, possessing so 
 very great a share of nervous sensibility. — 
 When I saw him again, I found him totally 
 changed ^ he was melancholy, very much 
 dejected and greatly enfeebled. There ap- 
 peared to exist a morbid elevation of his 
 nervous excitability. The muscles of his 
 face were affected with frequent spasms. 
 His hands trembled so much, that he was 
 scarcely able to hold anything. His eyes were 
 inflamed, they could not bear the light, and 
 they gave him considerable pain, when he 
 attempted to read, or to look at any object 
 attentively. His hearing was so very sensi- 
 tive, that all loud speaking caused him vio- 
 lent pain ; so that he could no longer endure 
 the sound of music, of which he had here- 
 tofore been so passionately fond. He lost 
 his appetite, became costive, complained of 
 unpleasant sensations in his abdomen, and 
 
99 
 
 upon the whole, he felt very unwell. — I felt 
 very uneasy on account of his state of health, 
 and particularly so, partly because his uncon- 
 querable aversion to anything but bread and 
 water renders it impossible to administer 
 medicines to him, and partly, because it is 
 to be feared that even the most inactive rem- 
 edies might operate too powerfully upon him 
 in the present highly excited state of his 
 nerves." 
 
 On the 18th of July, Caspar Hauser was 
 released from his abode in the tower, and 
 was committed to the domestic care and 
 superintendence of Mr Daumer, a professor 
 of a gymnasium, distinguished equally, for the 
 excellent qualities of his mind and of his 
 heart, who now took upon himself entirely 
 the care of his education, and who had also 
 hitherto paid a fatherly attention to his in- 
 struction, and to the formation of his mind. 
 In the family of this man, consisting of the 
 worthy mother and sister of his instructor, he 
 found in a manner a compensation for the 
 loss of those beings, whom nature had given 
 him, and of whom the wickedness of man 
 had deprived him. 
 
100 
 
 We may form some conception of the 
 multitude of persons to whose curiosity Cas- 
 par Hauser was exposed, from the circum- 
 stance, that the magistracy of Nuremberg 
 found it necessary, as soon as Caspar had 
 been committed to the care of Professor 
 Daumer, to insert the following notice in the 
 public journals ; 
 
 " The homeless Caspar Hauser, has, in 
 order to promote the development of the 
 powers of his mind and body, been commit- 
 ted, by the magistracy of the city of Nu- 
 remberg to the care of a particular instruc- 
 tor, who is well qualified to undertake that 
 office. That both of them may be freed 
 from any interruption in the pursuit of this 
 object, and that Caspar Hauser may be able to 
 enjoy that tranquillity, which in every respect 
 he so much needs, his instructor has been 
 directed, not to admit of any more visits to 
 Hauser for the future. 
 
 " The public in general, are therefore here- 
 by duly informed thereof; so that all may 
 avoid the mortification of being refused ad- 
 mittance to him : and it is also notified, that 
 pertinacious importunity in insisting upon 
 
101 
 
 admittance to him, will if necessary, be 
 resisted with the assistance of the police."* 
 At Professor Daumer's Caspar Hauser was 
 for the first time furnished, instead of the 
 bag of straw upon which he had lain in the 
 tower, with a proper bed, with which he 
 seemed to be exceedingly pleased. He 
 would often say, that his bed was the only 
 pleasant thing that he had met with in the 
 world ; everything else was very bad indeed. 
 — It was only after he slept in a bed, that 
 he began to have dreams. Yet, these he ^/^'^ 
 did not at first recognise as dreams, but re- 
 lated them to his instructor, when he awoke, 
 as real occurrences. It was only at a later 
 
 * This notice nevertheless did not entirely produce 
 the desired effect. As few strangers visit Nuremberg 
 without going to see the grave of St Sebaldus, the 
 paintings on glass in the church of St Lawrence, &c, 
 80 no one at that time, thought that he had fully seen 
 the curiosities of Nuremberg, who had omitted to 
 see the mysterious adopted child of that city From 
 the time of Caspar's arrvai at Nuremberg, to the 
 present moment, many hundreds of persons of almost 
 all European nations, of every rank, — scholars, artists, 
 statesmen, and officers of every description, as well 
 as noble and princely personages, — have seen and 
 spoken with him. 
 
 9* 
 
102 
 
 period that he learned to perceive the differ- 
 ence between waking and dreaming.* 
 
 One of the most difficult undertakings 
 was to accustom him to th e use of ordinary- 
 food, and this could be accomplished only by 
 slow degrees, with much trouble and great 
 caution. f The first that he was willing to 
 take, was water gruel ; which he learned to 
 relish daily more and more, and on this ac- 
 count he imagined that it was every day 
 made belter and better; so that he would 
 ask, what was the reason that it had not been 
 made so good at first ? Also all kinds of 
 food prepared from meal, flour and pulse, 
 and whatever else bore a resemblance to 
 bread, began soon to agree with him. At 
 length, he was gradually accustomed to eat 
 meat, by mixing at first only a few drops of 
 
 * These circumstances should not be left unnoticed 
 by those who make the philosophy of the human mind 
 their study ; as they afford striking illustrations of 
 the peculiar state of mind in which Caspar was at 
 that time. 
 
 t Before he became accustomed to warm food, he felt 
 a constant thirst : and he drank daily from ten to 
 twelve quarts of water. But even yet, he is still a 
 mighty water drinker. 
 
gravy with his gruel, and a few threads of 
 the muscular fibres of meat, of which the 
 juices had been well boiled out, with his 
 bread; and by gradually increasing the 
 quantity. 
 
 In the notes respecting Caspar Hauser, 
 which Professor Daumer has collected, he 
 has made the following observations; "After 
 he had learned regularly to eat meat, his 
 mental activity was diminished ; his eyes 
 lost their brilliancy and expression ; his vivid 
 propensity to constant activity was diminish- 
 ed ; the intense application of his mind gave 
 way to absence and indifference ; and the 
 quickness of his apprehension was also con- 
 siderably diminished. Whether this was 
 really the effect of his feeding on meat, or 
 whether this bluntness was not rather the 
 consequence of the painful excess of excite- 
 ment which preceded it, may very justly be 
 questioned. We may however conclude 
 with much greater certainty, that the change 
 of his diet, which was made by accustoming 
 him to warm nourishment and to some ani- 
 mal food, must have had a very perceptible 
 efTect upon his growth. In Professor Dau- 
 
104 
 
 mer's house, he increased more than two 
 inches in height, in a very few weeks. 
 
 As the inflammation of his eyes, and the 
 constant headache, with which every appli- 
 cation of his eyesight was attended, made it 
 impossible for him to read, to write, or to 
 draw, Mr Daumer employed him in making 
 pasteboard work, in which he very soon 
 acquired considerable dexterity. He also 
 taught him to play chess, which he soon 
 learned, and practised, with pleasure. Be- 
 sides this, he was employed in easy garden 
 work, and made acquainted with various pro- 
 ductions, phenomena, and powers of nature; 
 so that not a single day passed by, which did 
 not add something to his knowledge, and 
 make him acquainted with innumerable new 
 objects of surprise, wonder, and admiration. 
 
 It required no litde pains and much pa- 
 tience in correcting his mistakes, in order to 
 teach him the difference between things 
 which are, and such as are not organized ; 
 between animate and inanimate things ; and 
 between voluntary motion, and motion that 
 is communicated from without. Many 
 tilings which bore the form of men or ani- 
 
105 
 
 mals, though cut in stone, carved in wood, 
 or painted, he would still conceive to be ani- 
 mated, and ascribe to them such qualities 
 as he perceived to exist in animated beings. 
 It appeared strange to him, that horses, 
 unicorns, ostriches, &;c, which were hewn or 
 painted upon the walls of houses in the city, 
 remained always stationary, and did not run 
 away. — He expressed his indignation against 
 a statue in the garden belonging to the house 
 in w^hich he lived, because, although it was 
 so dirty, yet it did not wash itself. — When 
 for the first time he saw the great crucifix 
 on the outside of the church of St Sebaldus, 
 its view affected him with horror and with 
 pain : and he earnestly entreated, that the 
 man who was so dreadfully tormented, might 
 be taken down. Nor could he, for a long 
 time, be pacified, although it was explained 
 to him, that it was not any real man, but 
 only an image, which felt nothing. He 
 conceived every motion that he observed 
 to take place in any object, to be a sponta- 
 neous effect of life. If a sheet of paper 
 was blown down by the wind, he thought, 
 that it had run away from the table ; and, 
 
106 
 
 if a child's wagon was rolling down a hill, 
 it was, in his opinion, making an excursion 
 for its own amusement. He supposed, 
 that a tree manifested its life by moving its 
 twigs and leaves ; and its voice was heard 
 in the rustling of its leaves, when they were 
 moved by the wind. — He expressed his in- 
 dignation against a boy who struck the stem 
 of a tree with a small stick, for giving the 
 tree so much pain. — To judge from his ex- 
 pressions, the balls of a ninepin alley ran 
 voluntarily along ; they hurt other balls when 
 they struck against them, and when they 
 stopped, it was because they were tired. 
 Professor Daumer endeavored for a long 
 time in vain, to convince him that a ball does 
 not move voluntarily. He succeeded at 
 length in doing so, by directing Caspar to 
 make a ball himself from the crumbs of his 
 bread and afterwards to roll it along. — He 
 was convinced that a humming top, which he 
 bad long been spinning, did not move vol- 
 untarily, only by finding, that, after frequent- 
 ly winding up the cord, his arm began to 
 hurt him ; being thus sensibly convinced, 
 
107 
 
 that he had himself exerted the power which 
 was expended in causing it to move. 
 
 To animals, particularly, he for a long 
 time ascribed the same properties as to men ; 
 and he appeared to distinguish the one from 
 the other, only by the difference of their ex- 
 ternal form. He was angry with a cat for 
 taking its food only with its mouth, without 
 ever using its hands for that purpose. He 
 wished to teach it to use its paws and to sit 
 upright. He spoke to it as to a being like 
 himself, and expressed great indignation at 
 its unwillingness to attend to what he said, 
 and to learn from him. On the contrary, he 
 once highly commended the obedience of a 
 certain dog. Seeing a gray cat, he asked, 
 why she did not wash herself that she might 
 become white. When he saw oxen lying 
 down on the pavement of the street, he won- 
 dered why they did not go home and lie down 
 there. If it was replied that such things 
 could not be expected from animals, because 
 they were unable to act thus, his answer 
 was immediately ready : then they ought to 
 learn it ; there were so many things, which 
 he also was obliged to learn. 
 
108 
 
 Still less had he any conception of the 
 origin and growth of any of the organical 
 productions of nature. He always spoke as 
 if all trees had been stuck into the ground ; 
 as if all leaves and flowers were the work of 
 human hands. The first materials of an 
 idea of the origin of plants, were furnished 
 him by his planting, according to the direc- 
 tions of his instructor, a few beans, with his 
 own hands, in a flower pot; and by his 
 afterwards being made to observe, how they 
 germinated and produced leaves, as it were, 
 under his own eye. But in general, he was 
 accustomed to ask, respecting almost every 
 production of nature, who made that thing .^ 
 
 Of the beauties of nature he had no per- 
 ception. Nor did nature seem to interest 
 him otherwise, than by exciting his curiosity, 
 and by suggesting the question, who made 
 such a thing ? When for the first lime, he 
 saw a rainbow, its view appeared for a few 
 moments to give him pleasure. But he soon 
 turned away from it ; and he seemed to be 
 much more interested in the question who 
 made it ? than in the beauty of its apparition. 
 
109 
 
 Yet, there was one view, which made t 
 remarkable exception from this observation, 
 and which must be regarded as a great, and 
 never-to-be-forgotten incident, in the gradual 
 development of his mental life. It was in 
 the month of August, 1829, when, on a fine 
 summer evening, his instructor showed him 
 for the first time the starry heavens. His 
 astonishment and transport, surpassed all de- 
 scription. He could not be satiated with its 
 sight, and was ever returning to gaze upon 
 it; at the same time fixing accurately with 
 his eye the different groups that were pointed 
 out to him, remarking the stars most distin- 
 guished for their brightness, and observing 
 the differences of their respective color. 
 "That," he exclaimed, " is indeed the most 
 beautiful sight that I have ever yet seen in 
 the world. But who has placed all these 
 numerous beautiful candles there ? who lights 
 them ? w^ho puts them out ?" When he was 
 told that, like the sun with which he was al- 
 ready acquainted, they always continue to 
 give light, he asked again ; who placed them 
 there above, that they may always continue 
 to give light ? At length, standing motionless, 
 10 
 
no 
 
 with his head bowed down, and his eyes 
 staring, he fell into a train of deep and se- 
 rious meditation. When he again recovered 
 his recollection, his transport had been suc- 
 ceeded by deep sadness. He sank trembling 
 upon a chair, and asked, why that wicked 
 man had kept him always locked up, and 
 had never shown him any of these beautiful 
 things. — He (Caspar) had never done any 
 harm. He then broke out into a fit of cry- 
 ing, which lasted for a long time, and which 
 could with difficulty be soothed ; and said, 
 that the man with whom he had always been, 
 may now also be locked up for a few days, 
 that he may learn to know, how hard itis 
 to be treated so. Before seeing this beauti- 
 ful celestial display, Caspar had never shown 
 anything like indignation against that man ; 
 and much less had he ever been willing to 
 hear that he ought to be punished. Only 
 weariness and slumber were able to quiet 
 his sensations ; and he did not fall asleep — 
 a thing that had never happened to him be- 
 fore — until it was about 1 1 o'clock. Indeed, 
 it was in Mr Daumer's family that he began 
 more and more to reflect upon his unhappy 
 
HI 
 
 fate, and to become painfully sensible of 
 what had been withheld and taken from him, 
 It was only there, that the ideas of family, 
 of relationship, of friendship, — of those hu- 
 man lies, that bind parents and children and 
 brothers and sisters to each other, were 
 brought home to his feelings ; it was only 
 there, that the names mother, sister and bro- 
 ther were rendered intelligible to him, when 
 he saw, how mother, sister and brother, Vt^ere 
 reciprocally united to each other by mutual 
 affection, and by mutual endeavors to make 
 each other happy. He would often ask for 
 an explanation of what is meant by mother, 
 by brother, and by sister; and endeavors 
 were made to satisfy him by appropriate an- 
 swers. Soon after, he was found sitting in 
 his chair, apparently immersed in deep med- 
 itations. When he was asked what was now 
 again the matter with him? he replied with 
 tears : "he had been thinking about what 
 was the reason, why he had not a mother, a 
 brother and a sister ? for it was so very pretty 
 a thing to have them." As a state of perfect 
 rest from all mental exertion, was at that time 
 particularly indicated by his extreme excita- 
 
112 
 
 bility, and, as exercise seemed absolutely 
 necessary, to strengthen the feeble frame of 
 his body; it seemed, that, among other 
 modes of exercise, riding on horseback might 
 be highly beneficial to him ; especially, as 
 he seemed to have taken a great fancy for 
 it. As formerly wooden horses, so now 
 living horses had become his favorites. Of 
 all animals, the horse appeared to him to be 
 the most beautiful creature ; and whenever 
 he saw a horseman managing his steed, his 
 heart seemed to dilate with the wish, that he 
 also might have such a horse under him. 
 The riding master at Nuremberg, Mr Rum- 
 pier, had the complaisance to gratify this 
 longing ; and he received Caspar among his 
 scholars. Caspar, who with the most intent 
 watchfulness observed everything that was 
 told to him or to the other scholars, had in 
 the first lesson, not only imprinted the prin- 
 cipal rules and elements of the art of riding 
 upon his memory, but made them his own 5 
 so that in a few days he had made such pro- 
 gress, that old and young scholars, who had 
 been taking lessons for several months, were 
 obliged to acknowledge, that he was vastly 
 
113 
 
 their superior. His seat, his courage, and 
 his correct management of his horse, aston- 
 ished every one ; and he would undertake 
 feats of horsemanship which, besides himself 
 and his riding master, none dared to attempt. 
 Once, when the riding master had been 
 breaking in a fractious Turkish horse, he was 
 so little alarmed at the sight, that he request- 
 ed permission to ride that horse. — After 
 having exercised himself for some time, the 
 boundaries of the riding school became too 
 narrow for him ; he longed to manage his 
 horse in the open air; and here he evinced, 
 besides great dexterity, an inexhaustible en- 
 durance, hardihood and tenacity of body, 
 which could not be equalled, even by those 
 who were most inured to the exercise of 
 riding. He was particularly fond of spirited 
 and hard trotting horses, and he often rode, 
 for many hours together, without inter- 
 mission, without tiring, and without chafing 
 or feeling the least uneasiness. One after- 
 noon, he rode in a full trot from Nurem- 
 berg to the so called old Veste and back 
 again ; and this feeble youth, who, about 
 10* 
 
114 
 
 that time, would have been so much fatigued 
 with walking a few miles in the city, as to be 
 obliged to he down quite exhausted, and go 
 to bed a few hours sooner than usual, return- 
 ed from performing this gigantic feat, appa- 
 rently, as little fatigued as if he had only been 
 walking his horse from one gate of the city 
 to the other. This insensibility may, as Pro- 
 fessor Daumer supposes, be chiefly owing to 
 the fact, that he had been sitting for so many 
 years upon a hard floor is indeed by no means 
 improbable. Yet, besides this we may, from 
 Hauser's love of horses and his almost in- 
 stinctive equestrian dexterity, be led to form 
 the perhaps not altogether untenable conjec- 
 ture, that by birth he must belong to a nation 
 of horsemen. For, that abilities, which at 
 first indeed were acquired artificially, but 
 which have been sustained by practice 
 throughout successive generations, may final- 
 ly be propagated as natural propensities and 
 distinguished capacities for acquiring them, 
 is not unknown ; of which fact, the dexterity 
 in swimming peculiar to the South sea island- 
 ers, and the sharp sightedness of the North 
 
115 
 
 American hunter-nations may serve as in 
 stances. 
 
 Besides his extraordinary equestrian tal- 
 ents, the extreme peculiarity, the almost pre- 
 ternatural acuteness and intensity of his sen- 
 sual perceptions, appeared particularly re- 
 markable in Caspar Hauser, during his 
 abode in Professor Daumer's house. 
 
 As to his sight, there existed in respect 
 to him no twilight, no night, no darkness. 
 This was first noticed, by remarking that 
 at night he stepped everywhere with the 
 greatest confidence ; and that, in dark places, 
 he always refused a light when it was offer- 
 ed to him. He often looked with astonish- 
 ment, or laughed at persons, who in dark 
 places, for instance when entering a house 
 or walking on a staircase by night, sought 
 safety in groping their way, or in laying 
 hold on adjacent objects. In twilight, he 
 even saw much better than in broad day- 
 light. Thus, after sunset, he once read the 
 number of a house at the distance of 180 
 paces, which in day light, he would ^not 
 have been able to distinguish so far off. 
 
116 
 
 Towards the close of twilight, he once point- 
 ed out to his instructor a gnat, that was 
 hanging in a very distant spider's web . At 
 a distance of, certainly not less than sixty 
 paces, he could distinguish the single berries 
 in a cluster of elderberries from each other, 
 and these berries from black currants. It 
 has been proved by experiments carefully 
 made, that in a perfectly dark night, he could 
 distinguish different dark colors, such as blue 
 and green from each other. 
 
 When, at the commencement of twilight, 
 a common eye could not yet distinguish 
 more than three or four stars in the sky, he 
 could already discern the different groups 
 of stars, and he could distinguish the differ- 
 ent single stars of which they were com- 
 posed, from each other, according to their 
 magnitudes and the peculiarities of their 
 colored light. From the enclosure of the 
 castle at Nuremberg, he could count a row 
 of windows in the castle of Marloffstein ; 
 and from the castle, a row of the windows 
 of a house lying below the fortress of Roth- 
 enberg. His sight' was as sharp, in distin- 
 
117 
 
 guishing objects near by, as it was penetrating, 
 in discerning them at a distance. In anat- 
 omizing plants, he noticed subtile distinctions 
 and delicate particles, which had entirely 
 escaped the observation of others. 
 
 Scarcely less sharp and penetrating than 
 his sight, was his hearing. When taking a 
 walk in the fields, he once heard, at a dis- 
 tance comparatively very great, the footsteps 
 of several persons, and he could distinguish 
 these persons from each other, by their walk. 
 He had once an opportunity of comparing 
 the acuteness of his hearing with the still 
 greater acuteness of hearing evinced by a 
 blind man, who could distinguish even the 
 most gentle step of a man walking barefooted. 
 On this occasion, he observed that his hear- 
 ing had formerly been much more acute ; 
 but that its acuteness had been considerably 
 diminished, since he had begun to eat meat ; 
 so that he could no longer distinguish sounds 
 with so great a nicety as that blind man. 
 
 Of all his senses, that which was the most 
 troublesome to him, which occasioned him 
 the most painful sensations, and which made 
 his life in the world more disagreeable to 
 
118 
 
 him than any other, was the sense of smell- 
 ing. What to us is entirely scentless, was 
 not so to him. The most delicate and de- 
 lightful odors of flowers, for instance the 
 rose, were perceived by him as insupporta- 
 ble stenches, which painfully affected his 
 nerves. 
 
 What announces itself by its smell to oth- 
 ers, only when very near, was scented by 
 him at a very considerable distance. Ex- 
 cepting the smell of bread, of fennel, of 
 anise, and of caraway, to which he says he had 
 already been accustomed in his prison, — for 
 his bread was seasoned with these condi- 
 ments — all kinds of smells were more or 
 less disagreeable to him. When he was once 
 asked, which of all other smells was most 
 agreeable to him ? he answered, none at all. 
 His walks and rides, were often rendered 
 very unpleasant by leading him near to flower 
 gardens, tobacco fields, nut trees, and other 
 plants which affected his olfactory nerves ; 
 and he paid dearly for his recreations in 
 the free air, by suffering afterwards from 
 headaches, cold sweats, and attacks of fever. 
 He smelt tobacco, when in blossom in the 
 
119 
 
 fields, at the distance of fifty paces, and at 
 more than one hundred paces, when it wai^ 
 hung up in bundles to dry, as is commonly 
 the case about the houses in the villages near 
 Nuremberg. He could distinguish apple, 
 pear, and plum trees from each other at a 
 considerable distance, by the smell of their 
 leaves. The different coloring materials 
 used in the painting of walls and furniture, 
 and in the dying of cloths, &c, the pigments 
 with which he colored his pictures, the ink 
 or pencil whh which he wrote, all things 
 about him, wafted odors to his nostrils which 
 were unpleasant or painful to him. If a 
 chimney sweeper walked the streets, though 
 at the distance of several paces from him, he 
 turned his face shuddering from his smell. 
 The smell of an old cheese made him feel 
 unwell and affected him with vomiting. 
 The smell of strong vinegar, though fully a 
 yard distant from him, operated so power- 
 fully upon the nerves of his sight and smell, 
 as to bring the water into his eyes. When a 
 glass of wine was filled at table, at a con- 
 siderable distance from him, he complained 
 of its disagreeable smell, and of a sensation 
 
120 
 
 of heat in his head. The opening of a bot- 
 tle of champaigne, was sure to drive him from 
 the table or to make him sick. What we call 
 unpleasant smells, were perceived by him with 
 much less aversion, than many of our per- 
 fumes. The smell of fresh meat was to him 
 the most horrible of all smells. When Pro- 
 fessor Daumer, in the autumn of 1828, walked 
 with Caspar near to St John's churchyard, in 
 the vicinity of Nuremberg, the smell of the 
 dead bodies, of which the professor had not 
 the slighest perception, affected him so 
 powerfully, that he was immediately seized 
 with an ague, and began to shudder. The 
 ague was soon succeeded by a feverish heat, 
 which at length broke out into a violent per- 
 spiration, by which his linen was thoroughly 
 wet. He afterwards said, that he had never 
 before experienced so great a heat. When 
 on his return he came near to the city gate, 
 he said that he felt better ; yet he complain- 
 ed, that his sight had been obscured thereby. 
 Similar effects were once experienced by 
 him, (on the 28th of September, 1828,) 
 when he had been for a considerable time 
 walking by the side of a tobacco field. 
 
l«l 
 
 Professor Daumer first noticed the pecu- 
 liar properties of Caspar's sense of feeling 
 and his susceptibility of metallic excitements, 
 while he was yet at the tower. Here, a 
 stranger once made him a present of a little 
 wooden horse and a small magnet, with 
 which, as the forepart of the horse was fur- 
 nished with iron, it could be made to swim 
 about in different directions. When Caspar 
 was going to use this toy according to the in- 
 structions he had received, he felt himself 
 very disagreeably affected ; and he imme- 
 diately locked it up in the box belonging 
 to it, without ever taking it out again, as he 
 was accustomed to do with his other play- 
 things, in order to show it to his visitors. 
 When he was afterwards asked why he did 
 so ? he said, that that horse had occasioned 
 him a pain which he had felt in his whole 
 body and in all its members. After he had 
 removed to Professor Daumer's house, he 
 kept the box with the magnet in a trunk ; from 
 which, in clearing out his things, it was acci- 
 dentally taken and brought into notice. The 
 idea was suggested thereby to Professor 
 11 
 
122 
 
 Daumer, who recollected the occurrence 
 that had formerly taken place, to make an 
 experiment on Caspar with the magnet be- 
 longing to the little horse. Caspar very soon 
 experienced the most surprising effects: — 
 When Professor Daumer held the north pole 
 towards him Caspar put his hand to the pit 
 of his stomach and, drawing his waistcoat in 
 an outward direction, said that it drew him 
 thus ; and that a current of air seemed to pro- 
 ceed from him. The south pole affected him 
 less powerfully ; and he said that it blew 
 upon him. Professor Daumer and Professor 
 Herrmann made afterwards several other 
 experiments, similar to these and calculated 
 to deceive him ; but his feelings always told 
 him very correctly, and even though the 
 magnet was held at a considerable distance 
 from him, whether the north pole or the 
 south pole was held towards him. Such ex- 
 periments could not be continued long, be- 
 cause the perspiration soon appeared on his 
 forehead, and he began to feel unwell. 
 
 In respect to his sensibility of the pre- 
 sence of other metals, and his ability to dis- 
 
123 
 
 tinguish them from each other by his feelings 
 alone, Professor Daumer has collected a great 
 number of facts, from which I shall select 
 only a few. In autumn, 1828, he once acci- 
 dentally entered a store filled with hardware 
 and particularly with brass wares. He had 
 scarcely entered, before he hurried out again, 
 being affected with violent shuddering, and 
 saying that he felt a drawing in his whole 
 body in all directions. — A stranger who 
 visited him, once slipped a piece of gold of 
 the size of a kreutzer into his hand, without 
 Caspar's being able to see it ; he said imme- 
 diately, that he felt gold in his hand. — At 
 a time when Caspar was absent. Professor 
 Daumer placed a gold ring, a steel and 
 brass compass, and a silver drawing pen un- 
 der some paper, so that it was impossible for 
 him to see what was concealed under it. 
 Daumer directed him to move his finger over 
 the paper without touching it ; he did so ; 
 and by the difference of the sensation and 
 strength of the attraction, which these diffe- 
 rent metals caused him to feel at the points 
 of his fingers, he accurately distinguished 
 
them all from each other according to their 
 respective matter and form. — Once, when 
 the physician, Dr Osterhausen, and the royal 
 crownfiscal Brunner from Munchen happen- 
 ed to be present, Mr Daumer led Caspar, in 
 order to try him, to a table covered with an 
 oil cloth, upon which a sheet of paper lay, 
 and desired him to say, whether any metal 
 was under it ; he moved his finger over it and 
 then said : there it draws ! " But this 
 time," replied Daumer, " you are neverthe- 
 less mistaken ; for," withdrawing the paper, 
 " nothing lies under it." Caspar seemed at 
 first to be somewhat embarrassed ; but he put 
 his finger again to the place where he thought 
 he had felt the drawing, and assured them 
 repeatedly, that he there felt a drawing. 
 The oil cloth was then removed, a stricter 
 search was made, and a needle was actually 
 found there. — He described the feeling 
 which minerals occasioned him, as a kind of 
 drawing sensation, which passed over him, 
 accompanied at the same time with a chill, 
 which ascended accordingly as the objects 
 were different, more or less up the arm ; and 
 
125 
 
 which was also attended with other distinc- 
 tive sensations. At the same time, the veins 
 of the hand which had been exposed to the 
 metallic excitative, were visibly swollen. 
 Towards the end of December, 1 828, — when 
 the morbid excitability of his nerves had been 
 almost removed — his sensibility of the in- 
 fluence of metallic excitatives, began gradu- 
 ally to disappear and was at length totally lost. 
 Animal magnetism manifested itself in him in 
 a manner equally surprising ; and he retain- 
 ed his receptivity of it for a much longer time 
 than his receptivity of metallic excitements. 
 But, as the phenomena which appeared in 
 Caspar, agree in all their essential character- 
 istics with similar appearances in other well 
 known cases, it would be superfluous to add 
 any other observations respecting them, than, 
 that he always called his sensation of the 
 streaming in upon him of the magnetic fluid, 
 a blowing upon him. He experienced such 
 magnetic sensations, not only when in con- 
 tact with men, when they touched him with 
 the hand, or when they, even at some distance, 
 extended the points of their fingers towards 
 11* 
 
126 
 
 him, fee, but also, when he was in contact 
 with animals. 
 
 When he laid his hand upon a horse, a 
 cold sensation, as he said, went up his arm ; 
 and when he was mounted, he felt as if a 
 draught of wind passed through his body. 
 But these sensations went over after he had 
 several times rode his horse around the rid- 
 ing school. 
 
 When he caught a cat by the tail, he was 
 seized with a strong fit of shivering, and felt 
 as if he had received a blow upon his hand. 
 In March, 1824, he was for the first time 
 taken to a tent where foreign animals were 
 exhibited : and agreeably to his wish, he 
 was placed in the third row of spectators. 
 Immediately as he entered, he felt an ague, 
 which was greatly increased when the rattle- 
 snake was irritated and began to shake its rat- 
 tles ; and this was soon succeeded by a fever- 
 ish heat and profuse perspiration. The eyes 
 of the snake were not directed to the spot 
 where he sat ; and he maintains, that he was 
 not conscious of any sensation of terror or of 
 apprehension. 
 
127 
 
 We now leave Caspar's physical and phy- 
 siological aspect, in order to contemplate the 
 interior region of his mind, which, while it 
 exhibits to us the acuteness of his natural 
 understanding, enables us at the same time, 
 to draw exact conclusions concerning the fate 
 of his life, and the state of utter neglect, in 
 which his mind was left by the profligacy of 
 human beings. Though his soul was filled 
 with a childish kindness and gentleness, 
 which rendered him incapable of hurting a 
 worm, or a fly, much less a man ; though 
 his conduct, in all the various relations of 
 life, showed that his soul was spotless and 
 pure as the reflex of the eternal in the soul 
 of an angel, yet as we have already observed 
 he brought with him from his dungeon to the 
 light of the world, not an idea, not the least 
 presentiment of the existence of God, not a 
 shadow of faith in any more elevated, in- 
 visible existence. Raised like an animal, 
 slumbering even while awake, sensible in the 
 desert of his narrow dungeon, only of the 
 crudest w^ants of animal nature, occupied 
 with nothing but with the taking of his food, 
 and the eternal sameness of his wooden 
 
128 
 
 horses, the life of his soul could be com- 
 pared only to the life of an oyster, which ad- 
 hering to its rock, is sensible of nothing but 
 the absorption of its food, and perceives only 
 the eternal uniform dashing of the waves, 
 and, in its narrow shell, finds no room, even 
 for the most confined idea of a world without 
 it. Still less was he capable of having the 
 least presentiment of anything that is above 
 the earth, and above all w^orlds. Thus came 
 Caspar, unswayed indeed by prejudices, but 
 without any sense for what is invisible, incor- 
 poreal and eternal, to this upperworld, where, 
 seized and driven around by the stunning 
 vortex of external things, he was too much 
 occupied with visible realities to suffer the 
 want of anything that is invisible to become 
 perceptible to his mind. Nothing, at first 
 appeared to him to have any reality, but 
 what he could see, hear, feel, smell, or taste ; 
 and his awakened, and soon also speculative 
 understanding, would admit of nothing, that 
 was not based upon his sensual conscious- 
 ness, that could not be placed within the 
 reach of his senses, that could not be pre- 
 sented to him, in the form of some coarse 
 
129 
 
 (Ul?lVi3ilSIT" 
 
 conception of his understanding^iSfficiently 
 
 near to be brought home to him. All at- 
 tempts made, in the common way, to awak- 
 en religious ideas in his mind, were for a 
 long time entirely fruitless. With great 
 naivete, he complained to Professor Daumer, 
 that he did not know what the clergymen 
 meant by all the things that they told him ; 
 of which he could comprehend nothing. In 
 order somewhat to overcome his coarse 
 meterialistic ideas. Professor Daumer en- 
 deavored, in the following manner, to make 
 him receptive of some preparatory notions 
 of the possibility to conceive and to believe 
 the existence of an invisible world, and par- 
 ticularly the existence of God. Mr Dau- 
 mer asked him, whether he had not thoughts, 
 ideas, and a will. And when he acknow- 
 ledged that he had, he asked him whether 
 he could see them, hear them, &;c ? When 
 he said that he could not, he made him 
 observe, that he was therefore conscious 
 that there do exist things which we cannot 
 see, nor otherwise perceive externally. Cas- 
 par acknowledged this ; and he was much 
 astonished at this discovery of the incorpo- 
 
130 
 
 real natuce of our interior being. Daumer 
 continued, "a being that can think and will, 
 is called a spirit ; God is such a spirit, and 
 between him and the world, there exists a 
 relation, something like that between Cas- 
 par's thought and his body ; as he, Caspar, 
 can produce changes in his own body by 
 his invisible thinking, and willing, as he for 
 instance can move his hands and feet, so 
 God can produce changes in the world ; he 
 is the life in all things ; he is the spirit that 
 is operative in the whole world !" — Professor 
 Daumer now ordered him to move his arm, 
 and then asked him " if he could not at the 
 same time lift and move the other arm?" 
 Certainly ! " Now, hence you see then," 
 continued Professor Daumer, ** that your 
 invisible thought and will, that is, your spirit, 
 may be present and operative in two of your 
 members at once, and consequently in two 
 different places at the same time. The case 
 is the same in respect to God ; but on a 
 grand scale ; and now, you may form some 
 conception of what I mean by saying, that 
 God is everywhere present." — Caspar 
 evinced great joy when this had been ex- 
 
151 
 
 plained to him ; and he said to his instructoc, 
 that what he had now told him, was some- 
 thing " real ;" whereas other people had 
 never told him anything upon that subject 
 that was right. — Yet, instructions such as 
 these, had for a long time no other effect 
 than to render Hauser less refractory, when 
 the idea of God was presented to his mind ; 
 since thus a way was found, by which reli- 
 gious ideas could be instilled in him. But 
 the apparently inborn pyrrhoism of his na- 
 ture, would nevertheless, on various occa- 
 sions, break out anew in different forms and 
 in different directions. — He once asked, 
 whether we might pray to God for any par- 
 ticular thing, and whether he would grant us 
 what we prayed for; for instance, if he 
 prayed to God to cure the malady of his 
 eyes with which he was afflicted, would he 
 do it? He was answered, that he was cer- 
 tainly permitted to pray ; but that he must 
 leave it to the wisdom of God to determine, 
 whether it was proper that his prayer should 
 be granted. " But," he replied, " I wish 
 for the use of my eyes, that I may learn and 
 work ; and that must be good for me. God 
 
132 
 
 can have notliing against it." If he was 
 then instructed, that God has inscrutable 
 reasons for refusing us even what most evi- 
 dently appears to be good for us, in order, 
 for instance, to try us, and to exercise our 
 patience, such doctrines were always receiv- 
 ed by him coldly, and met with no acknow- 
 ledgment. — His doubts, questions, and ob- 
 jections, frequently embarrassed his instruc- 
 tor not a little ; for instance, once when the 
 conversation was concerning the omnipotence 
 of God, he proposed the question : Can 
 Almighty God also make time recede ? a 
 question, which contained a bitter sarcastic 
 allusion to the fate of his earlier life, and in 
 the back ground, concealed the inquiry, 
 whether God could restore his childhood 
 and youth, which had been lost to him in a 
 living grave. From these few remarks we 
 may infer, what was in his mind, the state 
 of positive religion, of christian dogmatics, 
 of the doctrine of the atonement, and of 
 similar doctrines, from stating his objections 
 to which I willingly refrain. 
 
 There were two orders of men, to whom 
 Caspar had, for a considerable time, an un- 
 
133 
 
 conquerable aversion ; — physicians and cler- 
 gymen ; to the first, " on account of the 
 abominable medicines which they prescribed 
 and with which they made people sick;" 
 and to the latter, because, as he expressed 
 himself, they made people afraid, and con- 
 fused them with incomprehensible stuff. 
 ' When he saw a minister, he was seized with 
 horror and dismay. If he was asked the 
 cause of this, he would reply : " because 
 these people have already tormented me 
 very much. Once, when 1 was at the tower, 
 four of them came to me all at once, and 
 told me things which at that time I could not 
 at all comprehend ; for instance, that God 
 had created all things out of nothing. When 
 I asked them for an explanation, they all 
 began to cry out at the same time, and 
 every one said something different. When 
 I told them: all these things 1 do not yet un- 
 derstand ; I must first learn to read and 
 write, they replied : these things must be 
 learned first. Nor did they go away, until 
 I signified to them my desire, that they 
 would at length leave me at rest." In 
 churches, therefore, Caspar felt by no means 
 12 
 
134 
 
 happy. The crucifixes which he saw there, 
 excited a horrible shuddering in him ; be- 
 cause for a long time he involuntarily as- 
 cribed life to images. The singing of the 
 congregation, seemed to him as a repulsive 
 bawling. '* First," said he, after returning 
 from attending a church, " the people bawl ; 
 and when they have done, the parson begins 
 to bawl." 
 
CHAPTER VII. 
 
 By the careful attention of Mr Daumer's 
 worthy family, by the use of proper exercise, 
 and by the judicious employment of his time, 
 Caspar Hauser's health had been greatly 
 improved. He was diligent in learning, in- 
 creased in knowledge, and made considera- 
 ble progress in cyphering and writing; and 
 he had progressed so far in the latter, that 
 about the summer of 1829, he was able, at 
 the desire o fthose who directed his actions, 
 to collect his recollections of his life into a 
 written memoir. This first attempt at an 
 original exposition of his thoughts, although 
 it could only be considered as a document 
 exhibiting the retarded progress, and the 
 consequent indigence and awkwardness of 
 his still childish mind, was nevertheless 
 viewed by him, with the eyes of a young 
 author when the first production of his pen 
 is about to appear in print. This itch of 
 
136 
 
 authorship, caused this so called history of 
 his life, to be shown both to native and for- 
 eign visitors ; and the story soon ran, and 
 even appeared in several public journals, that 
 Caspar Hauser was employed in writing a 
 history of his hfe. It is highly probable that 
 this very report occasioned the catastrophe, 
 which, soon after it was circulated, in the 
 month of October, the same year (1829), 
 was intended to bring his short life to a tragic 
 end. Caspar Hauser, — if we may be per- 
 mitted to indulge in conjectures — had at 
 length become, to those who kept him se- 
 cretly confined, a dangerous burthen. The 
 child which they had so long fed, had be- 
 come a boy, and was at length grown up 
 into a young man. He became restless, his 
 powers of life became more vivid, he some- 
 times made a noise, and it was necessary to 
 keep him quiet by means of severe chastise- 
 ment, of which he still bore fresh marks 
 when he came to Nuremberg. Why they 
 did not get rid of him in some other manner ? 
 Why they did not destroy him ? Why as a 
 child he had not been put out of the world ? 
 Whether, it may not have been with instruc- 
 
137 
 
 tions to murder him, that he was first deliv- 
 ered to his attendant, who, either from com- 
 passion, or with an intention to wait for times 
 more favorable to the child who was to be 
 made away with, or for other reasons that 
 may be imagined, had, at his own risk, kept 
 the child alive and fed it? — All this must 
 be left to conjecture. However this may be, 
 the time was come, or rather it was not 
 come ; the secreted individual could no long- 
 er be kept concealed ; it was necessary to* 
 get rid of him in some way or other, and — ^ 
 in a beggar's garb — he was sent to Nurem- 
 berg. It was intended, that he should dis- 
 appear there, either as a vagabond or an 
 idiot, in some public institution, or, if any 
 attention was paid to the recommendation 
 which he brought with him, as a soldier in 
 some regiment. Contrary to every expecta- 
 tion, none of these events took place ; the un- 
 known foundling met with humane commis- 
 eration and became the object of universal 
 public attention ; the public journals were 
 filled with accounts of this mysterious young 
 man and with conjectures respecting him. 
 From being the adopted child of the city of 
 12* 
 
138 
 
 Nuremberg, for which the magistracy of the 
 city had declared him, he became, at length, 
 the child — of Europe. The development 
 of Caspar's mind is everywhere spoken of, 
 marvellous things are related to the public 
 of his progress, and now, — this human ani- 
 mal is writing a history of his life I He who 
 gives a history of his life, must be able to 
 say something relating to it. 
 
 Those persons, therefore, who had every 
 reason to wish to remain in the darkness 
 which they had drawn around themselves, 
 and around all traces leading to them, could 
 not but feel very uneasy at hearing of this 
 intended autobiography. 
 
 The plan to bury poor Caspar alive in the 
 waves of a world entirely unknown to him, 
 had failed ; and it was only now that Caspar's 
 murder became, in the opinion of those who 
 had committed this secret crime, in a man- 
 ner, an act of self-defence. 
 
 Caspar was accustomed, between 1 1 and 
 12 o'clock, to go out of the house in order 
 to attend a lesson in cyphering. But on 
 Saturday, the 17th of October, he was direct- 
 ed by his tutor to remain at home, because 
 
139 
 
 he felt unwell. About that hour, Profes- 
 sor Daumer took a walk; and — besides 
 Caspar, who was known to be in his cham- 
 ber, — none remained at home, but Daumer^s 
 mother and his sister, who, about that time 
 were busy sweeping the house. 
 
 The house, in which Caspar lived at Dau- 
 mer's, lies in a distant and little frequented 
 part of the city, and is situated on an open 
 place of an extraordinary size, which can 
 scarcely be overlooked. The house, which, 
 being built according to the ancient custom 
 of Nuremberg, is very irregular and full of 
 edges and corners, consists of a front build- 
 ing in which the landlord lived, and a back 
 building in which Daumer's family resided. 
 A narrow house door leads, by a passage 
 inclosing the yard on two sides, to the stair- 
 case belonging to Daumer's quarters; and, 
 besides a wood room, a place for poultry, 
 and similar conveniences, there is in a corner, 
 close under a winding staircase, a very low, 
 small and narrow water closet. The small 
 space in which this is, was rendered still 
 smaller by a screen placed before k> Who- 
 ever is in the entry upon a level with the 
 
140 
 
 ground, (for instance near the wood room,) 
 is very well able to observe, who comes 
 down stairs and enters the water closet. 
 
 About 12 o'clock the same day, when 
 Professor Daumer's sister Catherine was 
 busy sweeping the house, she observed, upon 
 the staircase, which leads from the first story 
 to the yard, several spots of blood and 
 bloody footsteps, whicb she immediately 
 wiped away, without, on that account, think- 
 ing that anything extraordinary had happen- 
 ed. She supposed, that Caspar might have 
 been seized on the staircase with a bleeding 
 at the nose, and she went to his chamber, to 
 ask him about it. She did not find Caspar 
 there ; but she observed, also in his room, 
 near the door, a few bloody footsteps. 
 After she had again gone down stairs, in 
 order to sweep also the above mentioned 
 passage in the yard, single traces of blood 
 again met her eye, upon the stone pavement 
 of the passage. She went on to the water 
 closet where there lay a dense heap of clotted 
 blood : this she showed to the daughter of 
 the landlord, who had just come to the spot, 
 and who was of opinion that it was the blood 
 
141 
 
 of a cat. Daunier's sister, who immediately 
 spunged the blood off, was now still more con- 
 firmed in the opinion, that Hauser had stained 
 the staircase : he must have trod upon this clot 
 of blood, and neglected to wipe his feet be- 
 fore going up stairs. — It was already past 
 12 o'clock, the table was laid ; and Caspar, 
 who at other times had always punctually come 
 to dinner, staid this time away. The mother 
 of Professor Daumer went therefore down 
 from her chamber to call Caspar, but was 
 as unsuccessful in finding him, as her 
 daughter had been before her. 
 
 Mrs Daumer was just in the act of going 
 once more up into his chamber, when she was 
 struck with observing something moist upon 
 the cellar door, which appeared to her like 
 blood. Fearing that some misfortune had 
 happened, she lifted up the cellar door ; she ob- 
 served, upon all the steps of the cellar, drops 
 or large spots of blood ; she went down to the 
 lowest step ; and she saw, in a corner of the 
 cellar which was filled with water, something 
 white, glimmering at a distance. Mrs Dau- 
 mer then hurried back, and requested the 
 landlord's servant maid to go into the cellar 
 
142 
 
 with a candle to see what the white thing 
 was that lay there. She had scarcely held 
 the candle to the object pointed out to her 
 when she exclaimed : " There lies Caspar 
 dead." — The servant maid, and the son of 
 the landlord, who in the nneantime had conie 
 to their assistance, now lifted Caspar, who 
 gave no signs of life and whose face was 
 pale as death and covered with blood, from 
 the ground, and carried him out of the cellar. 
 When he was brought up stairs the first sign 
 of life that he gave was a deep groan ; and 
 he then exclaimed, with a hollow voice, 
 " man ! man !" — He was immediately put to 
 bed; where, with his eyes shut, he from 
 time to time cried out, or murmured to him- 
 self, the following words and broken sen- 
 tences. — " Mother ! — tell professor ! — man 
 beat — black man, like sweep (kuchen)* — 
 
 * This refers to an instance in which Caspar had 
 been very much frightened by the chimney sweeper 
 who was sweeping in the kitchen. The wordkuchen 
 probably meant koche — kitchen, which name he gave 
 to the chimney sweeper, who, as mentioned above, 
 had frightened him in the kitchen. T. 
 
143 
 
 tell mother — not found in my chamber — 
 hide in the cellar." 
 
 Upon this he was seized with a severe 
 ague, which was soon succeeded by violent 
 paroxysms, and finally by a complete frenzy, 
 in which several strong men were scarcely- 
 able to hold him down. In these fits, he bit 
 a considerable piece out of a porcelain cup, 
 in which a warm draught had been brought 
 him ; and he swallowed it along with the 
 drink. For almost fortyeight hours, he re- 
 mained in a state of perfect absence of mind. 
 In his delirium, during the night, he uttered 
 from time to time, the following broken sen- 
 tences : " Tell it to the burghermaster — 
 Not lock up. — Man away ! — man comes ! 
 — Away bell ! — I to Furth ride down. — 
 Not to Erlangen in the whale — not kill, 
 not hold the mouth shut — not die ! — Hau- 
 ser, where been ; not to Furth to-day ; not 
 more away ! head ache already. — Not to 
 Erlangen in the whale ! The man kill me ! 
 Away 1 Don't kill ! I all men love ; do no 
 one anything. Lady mayoress help ! — Man, 
 I love you too ; don't kill ! — Why the man 
 
144 
 
 kill ? I have done you nothing. — Don't kill 
 me ! I will yet beg that you may not be 
 locked up. — Never have let me out of my 
 prison, you would even kill me ! — You 
 should first have killed me, before I under- 
 stood what it is to live. — You must say why 
 you locked me up," &c. Most of these sen- 
 tences, he repeated, mingled incoherently 
 with each other. The result of the visitation 
 instituted, with the assistance of the medical 
 officer of the city jurisdiction, by the court of 
 inquiry appointed by the judicial authorities, 
 — to which the case was at length referred, 
 by the police court — was as follows : 
 
 " The forehead of Hauser, who was lying 
 in bed, was found to be hurt by a sharp 
 wound in the middle of it, concerning the 
 size and quality of which, the court's medical 
 officer has given the following report, which 
 was entered into the protocol. 
 
 " The wound is upon the forehead, about 
 lOj lines from the root of the nose, running 
 across it ; so that two thirds of the wound are 
 on the right, and one third of it on the left 
 side of the forehead The whole length of 
 tho wound, which runs in a straight line, is 
 19| lino«. 
 
145 
 
 ** At present, (October 20th) the edges of 
 ihe wound are closed, and there scarcely re- 
 mains an imerstlce of a quarter of a line be- 
 tween them. But tills is somewhat broader 
 at its left end than throughout the whole 
 course of the wound ; on which account it 
 is to be presumed, that it there penetrated 
 deepest. — As far as regards the origin of 
 the wound it was evidently given to Hauser 
 with a sharp cutting instrument, by a stroke 
 or thrust(r). The sharp edges of the wound 
 indicate the shnrpness of the instrument's 
 blade ; tlie straightness of tiie wound indi- 
 cates that it was occasioned by a stroke or 
 thrust (?) ; because, if the wound had been 
 purely a cut, its beginning and end would 
 have been more shallow and narrow, but the 
 middle deeper ; and, on that very account, it 
 would appear more gaping. It is however 
 most probable, that it was made by a stroke 5 
 because, if it had been made by a thrust, the 
 adjoining parts would have been more bruis- 
 ed." The wound, as the physician declared, 
 was in itself inconsiderable ; any other person 
 would have been cured of it in six days. 
 But, on account of the highly excitable state ol 
 13 
 
146 
 
 Caspar's nervous system, it was twentytwo 
 days before he recovered from the conse- 
 quences of his wound. 
 . Caspar relates the substance of what hap- 
 pened, as follows : " On the 17th I had been 
 obliged to put off the cyphering lesson which 
 
 I attended every day, at Mr ErJangen's, from 
 
 II to 12 o'clock; because, having, an hour 
 before received a walnut from Dr Preu, I 
 felt very ill ; although I had not eaten more 
 than a quarter of it. Professor Daumer, 
 whom I informed of the circumstance, there- 
 fore told me, that I should this time not at- 
 tend my usual cyphering lesson, but remain 
 at home. Professor Daumer went out, and 
 1 retired to my chamber. 
 
 " I intended to employ myself in writing ; 
 but was prvented by indisposition from do- 
 ing so, and compelled to go to the water- 
 closet. While there, I heard a noise, like 
 that which is usually heard when the door of 
 the wood-room is opened, and which is well 
 known to me ; I also heard a soft sound of 
 the house door bell ; this, did not however 
 appear to proceed from ringing it, but from 
 some immediate contact with the bell itself. 
 
147 
 
 Immedialely after, I heard gentle footsteps 
 from the lower passage ; and at the same 
 time 1 saw, through the space between the 
 screen before the private closet and the 
 small staircase, that a man was sneaking 
 through the passage. I observed the en- 
 tirely black head of the man, and thought it 
 was the chimney sweeper. Rut, when I 
 was afterwards preparing to leave the nar- 
 row apartment in which I was, and w^hen my 
 head was somewhat outside of it, the black 
 man stood suddenly before me, and gave me 
 a blow on the head ; in consequence of which 
 I immediately fell with my whole body on 
 the ground." (Now follows a description 
 of the man, which cannot well be communi- 
 cated.) '' Of the face and the hair of the 
 man, I could perceive nothing ; for he was 
 veiled, and indeed, as I believe, with a black 
 silk handkerchief drawn over his whole 
 head. 
 
 " After I had lain, probably, for a consider- 
 able time, without consciousness, I came again 
 to my senses. I felt something warm trickling 
 down my face, and both of my hands, which 
 I raised to my forehead, were in consequence 
 
148 
 
 thereof stained with blood. Frightened at 
 this, I intended to run to nnother ;"^ but, being 
 seized with confusion and terror, (for I was 
 still afraid, that the nian who had struck me 
 might attack me again,) instead of reaching 
 mother's door, I ran to the clothes press be- 
 fore my room.f Here my sight failed me, 
 and I endeavored to keep myself upright by 
 holding fast to the press with my hands. J 
 When I had recovered, I wished again to go 
 to mother's ; but, being still more confused 
 and straying still further, instead of going up 
 stairs, I discovered with horror that I had 
 come down stairs, and was again in the pas- 
 sage. The trap door of the cellar was 
 closed. Whence I got the strength to lift the 
 heavy trap door, is to this very moment in- 
 conceivable to me. Nevertheless I did lift 
 it, and slipped down into the cellar. § By 
 
 * So he always called his foster mother, the mother 
 of Professor Daumer. 
 
 t Every step of Caspar's, which is mentioned in the 
 above narrative, was found to be marked with bloody 
 traces. 
 
 t The bloody marks upon the press were still visible 
 for several days afterwards. 
 
 § How true and naturally, are here the effects of 
 terror and of fear described! — That Caspar did not 
 
149 
 
 the cold water in the cellar, through which 
 I was obliged to walk, I was restored to a 
 more perfect state of self-consciousness. I 
 observed a dry spot on the floor of the 
 cellar ; and T sat down upon it. I had 
 scarcely sat down, when I heard the clock 
 strike twelve. I then began to reflect: 
 * here you are entirely forsaken, no one will 
 look for you here.' — This thought filled my 
 eyes with tears, until I was seized with vom- 
 iting, and then lost my recollection. When 
 1 again regained my recollection, I found 
 myself in my room upon the bed, and 
 mother by my side." 
 
 In respect to the manner in which he was 
 wounded, I (the author of this) cannot join 
 the opinion of the court. 
 
 I have several reasons, but which cannot 
 with propriety be publicly made known, for 
 
 tireep into the cellar through the open cellar door and 
 that it was really necessary for him first to open it, 
 is a matter of fact, which cannot be doubted ; and it 
 is equally true, that the opening of the cellar door, 
 which to so feeble a person as Caspar was a Herculean 
 labor, would at any other time or in any other cir- 
 cumstances, have been quite impossible to him. 
 
 « 13* 
 
150 
 
 believing that Caspar Hauser's wound was 
 neither made by a stroke, nor by a thrust ; 
 neither with a sabre, with a hatchet, with a 
 chisel, nor with a common knife made for 
 cutting, but with another well known sharp 
 cutting instrument ; and that the wound was 
 not aimed at the head but at the throat ; but 
 (because, at the sight of the man and of the 
 armed fist which was suddenly extending 
 itself towards his throat, Caspar instinctively 
 stooped) that the blow glanced from his throat 
 which was protected by his chin, and was 
 led upwards. The person who committed the 
 act may have thought, when Caspar immedi- 
 ately fell down bleeding, that it had fully 
 succeeded ; and he dared not to remain any 
 longer by his victim in order to examine 
 whether it had fully succeeded or not, and in 
 case it had not to repeat the blow, because, on 
 account of the situation of the place, he had 
 every moment great reason to fear that he 
 would be detected by somebody. Thus 
 Caspar escaped, with a wound on the fore- 
 bead. 
 
 Other indications that might lead to the 
 
151 
 
 discovery of the person who had committed 
 the act, were soon discovered. Among 
 others for instance, it was discovered that, 
 on the same day and in the same hour when 
 the deed was done, the man described by 
 Caspar was seen to go out of Daumer's 
 house ; that nearly about the same time, the 
 same well dressed person described by Cas- 
 par was seen washing his hands (which were 
 probably bloody,) in a water trough which 
 stands in the street, not very far from Dau- 
 mer's house ; that, about four days after the 
 deed, a well dressed gentleman, who wore 
 clothes like those worn by the black man 
 described by Hauser, went up to a low wo- 
 man who was going to the city, and question- 
 ed her earnestly concerning the life or death 
 of the wounded Caspar; that he then went 
 with this woman close to the gate, where a 
 handbill was to be seen concerning Hauser's 
 wound, which had been stuck up by the 
 magistracy ; and that he afterwards, without 
 entering the city, absented himself in a very 
 suspicious manner, fcc. 
 
 But, if the reader's curiosity or his love of 
 
162 
 
 knowledge should inspire him with a wish 
 to learn slill more ; if he should ask me 
 what were the resultsof the judicial inquiries 
 which were instituted ; if he should desire to 
 know, to what tracks they have led, what 
 spots were actually struck by the divining rod, 
 and what was afterwards done ; I shall be 
 under the necessity of answering, that the 
 laws, as well as the nature of the case, forbid 
 the author to speak publicly of things, which 
 only the servant of the state can be permit- 
 ted to know or to conjecture. Yet I may 
 permit myself to pronounce the assurance, 
 that the judicial authorities have, with a faith- 
 fulness at once unwearied and regardless of 
 consequences, endeavored to prosecute their 
 inquiries concerning the case, by the aid of 
 every, even the most extraordinary means, 
 which were at their disposal ; and, that their 
 inquiries have not been altogether unsuc- 
 cessful. 
 
 But, not all heights, depths, and distances, 
 are accessible to the reach of civil justice. 
 And, in respect to many places in which jus- 
 tice might have reason to seek the giant perpe- 
 trator of such a crime, it would be necessary, 
 
153 
 
 in order to penetrate into them, to be in pos- 
 session of Josliua's ram's horns, or at least of 
 Oberon's horn, in order, for some time at 
 least, to suspend the action of the powerful 
 enchanted Colossuses that guard the golden 
 gates of certain castles. 
 
 But what is veiled in blackest shades of night, 
 Must, when the morning dawns, be brought to light. 
 
CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 If Caspar, who may now be reckoned 
 among civilized and well behaved men, were 
 to enter a mixed company without being 
 known, he would strike every one as a 
 strange phenomenon. 
 
 His face, in w^hich the soft traits of child- 
 hood mingle with the harsher features of 
 manhood, and a heart-winning friendliness 
 with thoughtful seriousness tinctured with a 
 slight tinge of melancholy ; his naivete, his 
 confidential openness, and his often more 
 than childish inexperience, combined with a 
 kind of sageness, and (though without af- 
 fectation,) with something of the gravity of a 
 man of rank in his speech and demeanor; 
 then, the awkwardness of his language, some- 
 times at a loss for words and sometimes 
 using such as have a harsh and foreign sound, 
 as well as the stiffness of his deportment and 
 his unpliant movements; — all these, make 
 him appear to every observant eye, as a 
 
155 
 
 mingled compound of child, youth, and man, 
 while it seems impossible at the first glance, 
 to determine to which compartment of life, 
 this prepossessing combination of them all 
 properly belongs. 
 
 In his mind, there appears nothing of 
 genius ; not even any remarkable talent ; * 
 what he learns, he owes to an obstinately 
 persevering application. Also the wild flame 
 of that fiery zeal, with which in the begin- 
 ning he seemed anxious to burst open all 
 the gates of science, has long since been ex- 
 tinguished. In all things that he undertakes, 
 he remains stationary, either at the com- 
 mencement, or when arrived at mediocrity. 
 Without a spark of fancy, incapable of ut- 
 tering a single pleasantry, or even of un- 
 derstanding a figurative expression, he pos- 
 sesses dry, but thoroughly sound common 
 
 * Except for horsemanship, of which he was al- 
 ways passionately fond. In managing his horse, as 
 well as in mounting and dismounting with dexterity 
 and elegance, he equals the most skilful riding master. 
 To many of our most distinguished officers, Caspar is 
 in this respect an object of admiration. 
 
156 
 
 sense, and in respect to things which directly 
 concern his person and which lie within the 
 narrow sphere of his knowledge and expe- 
 rience, he shows an accuracy, and an acute- 
 ness of judgment, which might shame and 
 confound many a learned pedant. 
 
 In understanding a man, in knowledge a 
 little child, and in many things more ignorant 
 than a child, the whole of his language and 
 demeanor, shows often a strangely contrast- 
 ed mingling of manly with childish beha- 
 viour. With a serious countenance and in a 
 tone of great importance, he often utters 
 things, which coming from any other person 
 of the same age would be called stupid or 
 silly; but which coming from him, always 
 force upon us a sad compassionate smile. 
 It is particularly farcical, to hear him speak 
 of the future plans of his life ; of the man- 
 ner, in which, after having learned a great 
 deal and earned money, he intends to settle 
 himself with his wife, whom he considers as 
 an indispensable part of domestic furniture. 
 
 He never thinks of a wife in any other 
 manner than as a house-keeper, or as an 
 
157 
 
 upper servant, whom a man may keep as 
 long as she suits him, and may turn away 
 again, if she frequently spoils his soup, and 
 does not properly mend his shirts or brush 
 his coats, &;c. 
 
 Mild and gentle, without vicious inclina- 
 tions, and without passions and strong emo- 
 tions, his quiet mind resembles the smooth 
 mirror of a lake in the stillness of a moon- 
 light night. Incapable of hurting an animal, 
 compassionate even to the worm, which he 
 is afraid to tread upon, timid even to cow- 
 ardice,*" he will nevertheless act regardless 
 of consequences, and even without forbear- 
 ance, according to. his own convictions, 
 whenever he thinks it necessary, to defend 
 or to execute purposes, which he has once 
 perceived and acknowledged to be right. If 
 he feels himself oppressed in his situation, 
 he will long bear it patiently, and will en- 
 deavor to get out of the way of the person 
 who is thus troublesome to him, or he will 
 
 ^ Particularly^ since the attempt [made to murder 
 him. 
 
 14 
 
158 
 
 V,. 
 
 endeavor to ejffect a change in his conduct, by 
 mild expostulations ; but finally, if he can- 
 not help himself in any other manner, as 
 soon as an opportunity of doing so offers, he 
 will very quiedy slip off the bonds that con- 
 fine him; yet without bearing the least 
 malice against him who may have injured 
 him. He is obedient, obliging, and yielding ; 
 but, the man that accuses him wrongfully, or 
 asserts to be true what he believes to be un- 
 true, need not expect, that from mere com- 
 plaisance or from other considerations, he 
 will submit to injustice or to falsehood ; he 
 will always modestly, but firmly, insist upon 
 his right ; or perhaps, if the other seems in- 
 clined obstinately to maintain his ground 
 against him, he will silently leave him. 
 
 As a mature youth who has slept away 
 his childhood and boyhood, too old to be 
 considered as a child, and too childishly 
 ignorant to be regarded as a young man ; 
 without companions of an equal age ; with- 
 out country, and without parents and rela- 
 tions ; as it were the only being of his kind — 
 every moment reminds him of his solitude 
 amidst the bustle of the world that presses 
 
159 
 
 upon him ; of his weakness, feebleness and 
 inability to combat against the power of 
 those contingencies that rule his fate ; and 
 above all, of the dependence of his person 
 upon the favor or disfavor of men. Hence, 
 his expertness in observing men, which was 
 almost forced upon him by the necessity of 
 self-defence ; hence the circumspect acute- 
 ness — which byill disposed persons has been ' 
 called slyness and cunning — with which he 
 quickly seizes their peculiarities and foibles, 
 and knows how to accommodate himself to 
 those who are able to do him good or harm, 
 to avoid offences, to oblige them, adroitly to 
 make known to them his wishes, and to ren- 
 der the good will of his favorers and friends 
 serviceable to him. Neither childish tricks 
 and wanton pranks, nor instances of mischief 
 and malice, can be laid to his charge ; for 
 the first, he possesses too much cool deliber- 
 ation and seriousness, and for the latter, he 
 possesses too much good nature, combined 
 with a love of justice, by the dictates of 
 which he regulates his conduct with a scru- 
 pulous exactness, which without affectation 
 approaches even to pedantry. 
 
160 
 
 One of the greatest errors committed in 
 the education of this young man and in the 
 formation of his mind, was evidently, that, 
 instead of forming his mind upon a model of 
 common humanity suited to his individual 
 peculiarities, he was sent a year or two ago 
 to the gymnasium, where he was besides, 
 made to commence in a higher class.* This 
 poor neglected youth, who but shortly be- 
 fore, had for the first time cast a look into 
 the world, and who was still deficient in so 
 much knowledge which other children ac- 
 quire at their mother's breast or in the laps 
 of their nurses, was suddenly obliged to tor- 
 ment his head with the latin grammar and 
 latin exercises ; with Cornelius Nepos, and, 
 finally even v/iih Caesar's Commentaries. 
 
 Screwed into the common forms of school 
 
 * From this situation he has, however, since I have 
 been writing this small work, been delivered by the 
 generosity of the noble Earl of Stanhope, who has 
 formally adopted him as his foster-son. 
 
 He lives now at Ansbach, where he has lately been 
 put under the care of an able schoolmaster, who has 
 taken him to the bouse. Some time hence he will, 
 under safe conduct, follow his beloved foster-father to 
 England. 
 
161 
 
 education, his mind suffered as it were its sec- 
 ond imprisonment. As formerly the walls of 
 his dungeon, so now, the walls of the school 
 room excluded him from nature and from life ; 
 instead of useful things he was made to learn 
 words and phrases, the sense of which, and 
 their relation to things and conceptions, he 
 was unable to comprehend ; and thus, his 
 childhood was, in the most unnatural 
 manner lengthened. While he was thus 
 wasting his time and the sufficiently scanty 
 powers of his mind upon the dry trash of a 
 grammar school, his mind continued to 
 starve, for want of the most necessary know- 
 ledge of things which might have nourished 
 and exhilarated it, which might have given 
 him some indemnification for the loss of his 
 youth, and might have served as a foundation 
 for some useful employment of his time in 
 future. '' I do not know" — he would often 
 say with vexation, and almost in despair — "I 
 do not know, what good all these things are 
 to do me, since I neither can nor wish to 
 become a clergyman." When once a pedant 
 said to him : "the Latin language is indispens- 
 ably necessary for the sake of the German 
 language; in order to have a thorough 
 14* 
 
162 
 
 knowledge of the German, it is necessary to 
 learn the Latin," his good sense replied ; " was 
 it then necessary for the Romans to learn 
 German in order to have a thorough know- 
 ledge of how they were to speak and write 
 Latin?" 
 
 We may judge, how the Latin suited Cas- 
 par and Caspar the Latin, from the circum- 
 stance, that, when this bearded latinist was 
 staying with me for a short time in the spring 
 of 1831, he had not yet learned by experi- 
 ence, that objects of sight appear smaller at 
 a distance than they really are. He won- 
 dered, that the trees of an alley in which we 
 were walking became smaller and lower 
 and the walk narrower at a distance ; so 
 that it appeared as if at length it would be 
 impossible to pass them. He had not ob- 
 served this at Nuremberg ; and when he had 
 walked down the alley vtuth me, he was 
 astonished, as if he had been looking upon 
 the effects of magic, to find that all these 
 trees were equally high, and that the walk 
 was everywhere equally broad. 
 
 The oppressive consciousness of his igno- 
 rance, helplessness and dependence; the 
 
163 
 
 conviction that he shoul d never be able to 
 regain his lost youth, to equal those who 
 were of the same age with him, and to become 
 a useful man in the world ; that, not only 
 had the most beautiful part of man's life 
 been taken away from him, but that also the 
 whole remainder of his life had been crippled 
 and rendered miserable ; and finally, that 
 besides all this, the miserable remainder of 
 his respited life, was every moment threatened 
 by a secret enemy, — by the dagger of an 
 assassin; — these are the miserable contents 
 of the tale that is told by the clouds of 
 grief which overhang his brow, and not unfre- 
 quently, pour themselves forth in tears and 
 sorrowing lamentations. 
 
 During the time while he was staying at 
 my house, I often took him along with me 
 in my walks ; and I conducted him once, on 
 a pleasant morning, up one of our so called 
 mountains, where a beautiful and cheerful 
 prospect opens upon the handsome city lying 
 beneath it, and upon a lovely valley sur- 
 rounded by hills. Caspar was for a moment 
 highly delighted with the view ; but he soon 
 became silent and sad. 
 
164 
 
 To my question concerning the reason of 
 his altered humor, he replied : "I was just 
 thinking, how many beautiful things there 
 are in the world, and how^ hard it is for me 
 to have lived so long, and to have seen noth- 
 ing of them ; and how happy children are, 
 who have been able to see all these things 
 from their earliest infancy, and can still look 
 at them. I am already so old, and am still 
 obliged to learn what children knew long 
 ago. I wish I had never come out of my 
 cage ; he who put me there, should have 
 left me there. Then I should never have 
 known and felt the want of anything 5 and I 
 should never have experienced the misery 
 of never having been a child, and of having 
 come so late into the world." I endeavored 
 to pacify him by telling him, " that in respect 
 to the beauties of nature, there was no great 
 cause for regretting his fate in comparison 
 with that of other children and men, who 
 had been in the world since their childhood. 
 Most men, having grown up amidst these 
 glorious sights, and considering them as 
 common things which they see every day, 
 regard them with indifference ; and retaining 
 
165 
 
 the same insensibility throughout their whole 
 life, they feel no more at beholding ihem, 
 than animals, grazing in a meadow. For 
 him (Caspar,) who had entered upon life as 
 a young man, they had been preserved in all 
 their freshness and purity ; and hereby no 
 small indemnification was given him for the 
 loss of his earlier years ; for herein he pos- 
 sessed no inconsiderable advantage over 
 others. He answered nothing, and seemed, 
 if not convinced, yet somewhat comforted. 
 But it will never be possible, at any time, 
 entirely to comfort him respecting his fate. 
 He is a tender tree, from which the crown 
 has been taken, and the heart of whose root 
 is gnawed by a worm. 
 
 In such stales of mind, and thus feeling 
 his situation, religion, faith in God, and a 
 hope in providence founded upon that faith, 
 could not but find entrance into a heart so 
 much in need of comfort. He is now, in 
 the true sense of the word, a pious man ; he 
 speaks with devotion of God, and is fond of 
 reading books of rational edification. But 
 to be sure, he would swear to none of the 
 
166 
 
 symbolical books ; and much less would he 
 feel happy, in a devout assembly of the dis- 
 ciples of Hengstenberg and company.* 
 
 Taken by times away from the nursery 
 tales of his early attendants, buried as a child, 
 and raised again to life as a ripe young man, 
 he brought with him, to the light of the world, 
 a mind free from every kind of superstition. 
 As in the beginning it was with difficulty that 
 he could be made conscious of the existence 
 of his own spirit, he is in no wise inclined to 
 believe in spectral spirits. He laughs at the 
 belief of spectral apparitions, as the most 
 inconceivable of all human absurdities : he 
 fears nothing, but the secret enemy whose 
 murderous steel he has felt ; and, if security 
 could be given him, that he had nothing to 
 fear from that man, he would walk at any 
 hour of the night over a churchyard, and 
 sleep without apprehension upon graves. 
 
 His present mode of life is that which is 
 common to most men. With the exception 
 
 ** He was educated in the evangelical-Lutheran 
 religion, which most of the inhabitants of Nuremberg 
 profess. 
 
167 
 
 of pork, he eats all kinds of meats that are 
 not seasoned with hot spices. His favorite 
 condiments are still carraway, fennel, and 
 coriander. His drink continues to be water ; 
 and only in the morning, he takes a cup of 
 unspiced chocolate instead of it. All fer- 
 mented liquors, beer and wine, as also tea 
 and coffee, are still an abomination to him ; 
 and, if a few drops of them were forced upon 
 him, they would infallibly make him sick. 
 
 The extraordinary, almost preternatural 
 elevation of his senses, has also been dimin- 
 ished, and has almost sunk to the common 
 level. He is indeed still able to see in the 
 dark ; so that, in respect to him, there exists 
 no real night but only twilight ; but he is no 
 longer able to read in the dark nor to recog- 
 nise the most minute objects in the dark at a 
 great distance. Whereas he was formerly 
 able to see much better and more distinctly 
 in a dark night than by day-light, the contrary 
 is now the case. Like other men, he is now 
 able to bear, and he loves the light of the 
 sun, which no longer distresses his eyes. 
 Of the gigantic powers of his memory, and 
 
168 
 
 of other astonishing qualities, not a trace re- 
 mains. He no longer retains anything that 
 is extraordinary, but his extraordinary fate, 
 his indescribable goodness, and the exceed- 
 ing amiableness of his disposition^ 
 
RETURN TO DESK FROM WHICH BORROWED 
 
 CIRCUUT!ON DEPARTMENT 
 
 This book is due on the last date stamped below, or m 
 on the date to wh" " 
 
 oks are subject to immedlafe^call. 
 
 : H 19/ 
 
 MT'D SEP 2 1 fQf y 
 
 lfT~9 
 
 iji 
 
 % 2 19 1983 
 
 ^ 
 
 MAR 1 199^ 
 
 .'^^^^ AUTO MSCCiRC MfiR25'93- 
 
 -f 
 
 NOV 1 7 ^^T8 
 
 SENtONILL 
 
 KbO. Gift. OCT 2^'"?^ 
 
 JUN 2 9 1995 
 
 U. C. B£BK£L5Y 
 
 T.rkOI QO*v. 1 "7K 
 
 
IM yjyJOUH 
 
 U.C. BERKELEY LIBRARIES 
 
 CD3flMEES3M 
 
 af^/4 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA UBRARY