On this day in 1800, after years of sightings and encounters, a feral twelve-year-old boy came out of the woods near Aveyron, France. Dubbed the Savage of Aveyron, he possessed no clothing, spoke no language, and had been isolated from human contact since age four or five. Eventually he was adopted by a medical student, Jean Marc Gaspard Itard, who named him Victor. Victor spent the rest of his life as a scientific curiosity and subject of philosophical debates concerning mans difference with the animals.
