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Updated: June 27, 2025
The transmutation of human beings into mules, and vice versa, is a common fable, and we meet with wolf-children and the curious superstition that unbaptised people can penetrate into the domains of the enchanted Moors, and that these have no power to injure them.
The author of the pamphlet expressed some surprise that there was no case on record in which a grown man had been found in such association. This curious collection of cases of wolf-children is attributed to Colonel Sleeman, a well-known officer, who is known to have been greatly interested in the subject, and who for a long time resided in the forests of India.
In Oude there have been many instances verified, or at least impossible of contradiction, of so-called wolf-children, infants stolen by wolves and suckled by them, that go on all fours, eat only raw meat, and, of course, speak no language.
Rudyard Kipling, possibly inspired by accounts of these wolf-children in India, has ingeniously constructed an interesting series of fabulous stories of a child who was brought up by the beasts of the jungles and taught their habits and their mode of communication. The artificial manufacture of "wild men" or "wild boys" in the Chinese Empire is shown by recent reports.
Homeless, unkempt, and uncouth, traveling aimlessly on a journey which he does not understand, he hugs to his heart a marvelous power, which he declares to be a gift from God. To his weak mind it lifts him above his fellow-men, and yet it is as useless to the world as a diamond in a dead man's hand." Wolf-Children.
Recently a writer in the Badmington Magazine, in speaking of the authenticity of wolf-children, says: "A jemidar told me that when he was a lad he remembered going, with others, to see a wolf-child which had been netted.
There were great rejoicings that day in the village of Darque; and no one was better pleased than John at having regained his proper shape. He was never known to join in the inhuman sport of hunting wolves for pleasure, because, as he said, although they may not be wolf-children, they do but obey an instinct which was given them; and to be kind-hearted is to obey a precept which was given us.
The story of Romulus and Remus, which all schoolboys and the vast majority of grown people regard as a myth, appears in a different light when one studies the question of wolf-children, and ascertains how it comes to pass that boys are found living on the very best terms with such treacherous and rapacious animals as wolves, sleeping with them in their dens, sharing the raw flesh of deer and kids which the she-wolf provides, and, in fact, leading in all essentials the actual life of a wolf.
Some time after this, while staying at an up-country place called Shaporeooundie, in East Bengal, it was my fortune to meet an Anglo-Indian gentleman who had been in the Indian civil service for upward of thirty years, and had traveled about during most of that time; from him I learned all I wanted to know of wolf-children, for he not only knew of several cases, but had actually seen and examined, near Agra, a child which had been recovered from the wolves.
The tale of the Roman she-wolf is well known, and may have been something more than a myth, as there have been several apparently authentic cases reported in which a child has been rescued from its associations with a wolf who had stolen it some time previously. Most of the stories of wolf-children come from India.
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