Evening Republican, Volume 23, Number 96, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 20 April 1920 — NOT TRUE ‘GENIUS' [ARTICLE]

NOT TRUE ‘GENIUS'

"Wonder Children” Merely Intellectually Precocious. In Moat Cases They Are Possessors of an Abnormally Retentive Memory —Do Not Necessarily Die - - -Young. A few day* ago there appeared an account of the doings of Samuel Reschevski, a wonderful chess player, years old, who is confounding Berlin with his uncanny knowledge and skill. These “wonder children” always arouse especial interest, and. a* many explanations are put forward to account for their apparent genius, there are gloomy forebodings as to their meeting with an early death. There have been many “wonder children” In the past, and It Is strange, though true, that quite a large proportion have lived to the average'age. In recent years there have .been a number of child evangelists Who Wave startled the world by their eloquence and theology. In the United States a few years ago a boy nine years old attempted to convert the whole country, and when ten years old he was actually appointed minister of a church in North Carolina. In Great Britain there are records of a child twelve years old who preached In a Baptist church at Porthcawl, and a small boy who. at the tender age of' three, began preaching to crowded audiences and continued to do so until well after ten years old. In the case of such prodigies, their talents consist chiefly in an abnormal, retentive memory and, provided that their temperaments are not emotional, they stand the mental strata exceedingly well, though there la, of course, the danger attached to the excessive physical strain which they frequently undergo. To this type belong those children who learn rapidly by heart such things as the tunes, words and numbers of all hymns In the ancient and modern hymn-book. It is such children, with a high development of one faculty, who most often meet with early death, and maybe It was In such cases that old saying, “The wise die young” had it* origin.

But the child chess player in Berlin belongs rather to the type" of intellectual'precocities, such as the learned child of Lubeck of the early part of the eighteenth century. This child could recite the whole of the Old and New Testaments before he was two years old, and a little later he was an authority on religious history and dogma. He mastered also ancient and modern'geography and history and several languages before his death at the age of four years. A contemporary of this wonderful child was fluent in five languages before he was five, and translated the Hebrew Bible Into Latin and French at the age of eight. He survived until he was nineteen. Historical and clinical evidence are both definite in showing that “wonderchildren” are no more liable than other children to die young, nor is it found that children who assimilate knowledge readily and retain it show any undue signs of fatigue. The great point in the case of children marked by special brilliance is to avoid any attempt at making the brilliance apply to everything, for in so doing the existing brilliance in the one special direction may tend to disappear. In the same way those who are intellectually brilliant must not be forced to become industrious In a practical way, for such interference Invariably brings on over-strain arfd Breakdown.