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Again Heinecken learned to speak very early; at ten months old he was asking intelligent questions, at eighteen months he was studying history, geography, Latin and anatomy; whereas the Stott child had only once been heard to speak at the age of two years, and had not, apparently, begun any study at all.
He came to the bottom of the hill, and after he left me he took the road that goes over the hill to Wenderby. It would be about seven miles back to Pym by that road.... I spent the next afternoon in the Reading Room of the British Museum. I was searching for a precedent, and at last I found one in the story of Christian Heinrich Heinecken, who was born at Lubeck on February 6, 1721.
Here was surely a case of genius which, comparable in some respects to the genius of Heinecken, yet far exceeded it. As I developed my theory, my eagerness grew. And then suddenly an inspiration came to me. In my excitement I spoke aloud and smacked the desk in front of me with my open hand. "Why, of course!" I said. "That is the key." An old man in the next seat scowled fiercely.
Grossmann said, putting his hands behind him and gently nodding his head like a tolerant schoolmaster awaiting the inevitable confusion of the too intrepid scholar. "Christian Heinecken?" suggested Elmer. "Ah! You have not then read my brochure on certain abnormalities reported in history?" Grossmann said, and continued, "Mr. Aylmer, is it not? To whom I am speaking? Yes?
From this comparison it might seem at first that the balance of precocity lay in the Heinecken scale. I drew another inference. I argued that the genius of the Stott child far outweighed the genius of Christian Heinecken. Little Heinecken in his four years of life suffered the mental experience with certain necessary limitations of a developed brain.
The American small boy is precocious; but it is not with the erudite precocity of the German Heinecken, who at three years of age was intimately acquainted with history and geography ancient and modern, sacred and profane, besides being able to converse fluently in Latin, French, and German.
We have met, I believe, once in Leipzig. I thought so. But in my brochure, Mr. Aylmer, I have examined the Heinecken case and shown my reasons to regard it as not so departing from the normal." Elmer shook his head. "Your reasons are not valid, Herr Professor," he said and held up a corpulent forefinger to enforce Grossmann's further attention.
There were, at least, five men present who would, he believed, immediately conduct the examination on their own account, should he refuse the opportunity; men who would not fail to use their material for the demolition of that pamphlet on the type of abnormality, more particularly represented by the amazing precocity of Christian Heinecken.
These writings will therefore remain a sealed book to posterity, unless well informed connoisseurs of art, who lived nearer those times, should soon decide either to write or cause to be written a description of the then existing conditions, in so far as this is still possible. Lippert, Hagedorn, Oeser, Dietrich, Heinecken and Oesterreich loved, practised and promoted art, each in his own way.
Heinecken, on the contrary, could not be honorably mentioned, partly because he devoted himself too assiduously to the ever-childish beginnings of German art; which Oeser little valued, partly because he had once treated Winckelmann shabbily, which could never be forgiven him.
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