Orthogenic Cases XIII: Obadiah, a Child with a Numerical Obsession
The Psychological Clinic Copyright, 1918, by Lightner Witmer, Editor. Vol. XII, No. 4. June 15, 1918 :Author: Sarah Warfield Parker, A.M., Philadelphia, Pa.
In the strangeness of a new school and a new home, Obadiah stood aloof, watching?and counting. To him, it was a peculiar community?this one in which children did what they were told, and a curious house, too, where a shrill shriek of “When’s Obadiah going to get his pie?” brought no response. So he watched with large grey eyes, and, because he could not help it, he counted, with swift, furtive movements of the lips, the chairs in the room, the roses in the border on his plate, the raisins in the pudding, the scallops on his doily, everything that could be translated into number. With the children he felt no consciousness of kind. Sometimes he walked among them stiffly, holding his body as though his spine were a steel rod inclined a little backward. Oftener, he simply stood, a small, somber figure in a grey striped suit, with a round well-shaped head set low on narrow shoulders, with fine, straight hair of the brown which blends into grey, and with a skin that was without color and soft to touch. He was not yet six; yet he never played, he never ran. As he stood with the children, solemn, drab, and stiff, you could amost visualize the circle which set him apart from the others, so that they rarely spoke to him or he to them. The adults in the house at first possessed for him but few attributes. They were moving objects who made him obey, who presented him with food, and who wore wrist watches. He spoke to them only to announce his immediate movements: “Obadiah’s going to take a little west. Obadiah’s going to west till ten minutes of six, one hour and fifty minutes”; or to demand with a frantic grab at the watch: “How many minutes till supper?” At such times he often broke into hysterical protest: “When’s Obadiah going to have his supper? Supper’s at six-firty. It’s twenty-seven minutes of seven. Supper’s free minutes late. When’s Obadiah going to have his supper?”
Inanimate objects, except as he counted them, crossed his threshold of consciousness even less effectively. He could not dress, nor attend to himself at toilet. He did not try to put on his hat, coat, or gloves, or to take them off. He did not touch things about the house, or on the playground. He never looked at a book except to count the pages. The only toy he noticed was a velocipede which he took sober pleasure in riding solemnly round and round. How little he saw on a walk and how much less he could express is suggested by a dialogue recorded in the first month he was with us. “What did you see on our walk today?” he was asked.
Obadiah whispered the echolalic response, “On our walk today.” When the question was repeated, he started the absurd monotonous chant he used so often to avoid the trouble of thinking about subjects which did not interest him: “Somefing,?nofing.” A third insistent repetition drew the response, “A church.”
“What else?” “A chicken.” “What color was the chicken?” “Blue,” in a thin chanting monotone. “What else did you see?” “About free fings,” in the same swift monotone. “You’ve told me only two. What else did you see?” “Bricks.” “Anything else?” “About six fings.” “Then what else did you see?” “You saw a sight.” “What did you see?” “A sight.”
To music alone he responded with evident pleasure. He would bring a stool and sit motionless, close to the piano, listening. The world, for Obadiah, seemed to consist, not of a varied complex of environing stimuli, but only of a few pleasing sounds to be listened to, a few substances to be eaten, and many, many objects to be counted. Of all that could be numbered, he found minutes most fertile in possibilities for novel and infinite calculation. This was our first impression of the curious, and as we came to to know him, the winsome, child whom we had with us for six months’ training and observation.
Although his age was less than six, Obadiah could number this school as his fourth. The winter after his fourth birthday, six weeks in a Montessori school started the misapplication of that method in his own home. The next autumn, while he attended for two months a church kindergarten in Elizabethtown, his grandmother, with the grim aid of a stick, tried, with only temporary success, to mend the result of the year in which, by hysterical outbursts and consistent heedlessness of commands, he had run his own undisciplined way. Now, in the succeeding winter, Obadiah had been dropped from one of the best of the city special classes because he never obeyed and because he spent most of his school time in screaming and yelling.
Because of this malconformity in behavior which made it impossible to teach him with his fellows, and not because of his extraordinary talent for number, Mr. and Mrs. F. had brought their perplexing son to the Psychological Clinic. The curious concentration of this six-year-old upon number, however, and his consequent abstraction from other performances, were conspicuous from the moment that Obadiah, in a prim white suit, first stood in the laboratory, one February day, rapidly counting the windows before he put his first characteristic question, “How many floors has this school?” It was apparent in his reaction to every test. With space perception adequate to the task, he replaced all the blocks in the Witmer formboard, but it took him 76 seconds to do it the first time, for he worked excitedly, with his attention on other things, and remarked as he finished, “Eleven blocks. Eleven people were at the house this week.” In the cylinder test, at first, he played idly with the blocks, and repeated the examiner’s directions with persistent echolalia. After he had placed four of the eighteen blocks by the trial and error method, often attempting to jam a large block into a small hole, Obadiah stopped work to count the recesses. To the examiner’s command to get back to work he replied with the statement, “You have fourteen more blocks.” Since, therefore, this child who had never been taught arithmetic, fixed his attention so obstinately upon number, Dr Witmer gave Him a few problems, “If you take five away from eighteen, how many will you have left? ” was the first.
Obadiah began to count rapidly, “17?16?15?14?13, firteen.” he announced. On five similar examples in simple subtraction, he made no mistake. “Take two away from forty-five.” Obadiah counted with swift movements of his fingers. “44, 43, forty-free.” “Take twelve away from forty-five.” Obadiah counted as before: “45?44?43?42?41?” and so to 32, announcing at the end, “firty-two,” his first error. 108 THE PSYCHOLOGICAL CLINIC. The pegboard, too, with thirty-six holes arranged in rows of six, excellent material for calculation, held Obadiah’s attention for some time. “How many holes are there in this board?” Dr Witmer asked him. “Free: six,” Obadiah began, counting the first row by threes. “Twelve,” he continued, either mentally adding the next six, or counting the second row with such swiftness as not to be apparent to the observer. Thence, he counted by ones very quickly to thirty-six, never touching the holes, and keeping his attention upon the discrete units to be enumerated with remarkable persistence and analytic concentration. After Obadiah had pushed three of the pegs into the holes, he was asked, “Now how many holes are empty?” The reply was instant, ” Firty-free.” When all of the pegs were placed, Dr Witmer covered five of the rows, leaving only one row of six holes exposed. “How many sixes are here?” he asked. “One six,” answered Obadiah, understanding the question without explanation. Dr Witmer removed the cover, exposing the entire board. “How many sixes are here?” “Six sixes.” He pointed to the board, asking, “How many are two sixes?” Obadiah made a swift silent calculation, “Twelve.” “Three sixes?” The child counted from twelve to eighteen. “Four sixes?” He counted in a bored tone to twenty-four, and similarly to “firty,” and to ” firty-six.” By this time, he was tired of the performance, and broke away to run up the steps, counting them as he mounted. An hysterical giggle and an excited racing about the room was his reaction to the command to come back. Commenting upon this behavior, Dr Witmer remarked that never once thus far during the examination had Obadiah obeyed. The child had merely been maneuvered into quietness by plying him with work which he liked to do. At length Obadiah was lured back to his place by a picture book, but was listless, inattentive, erratic. A cat he called a chicken in a sing-song tone, and deigned to answer correctly only such questions as, “How many feet has this horse?” He was held in rein with the utmost difficulty till one of the examiners left the room. Then, almost reflexly, he broke into one of the hysterical shrieking monoA NUMERC1AL OBSESSION. 109 logues in which he invariably referred to himself in the second or third person. He jumped up and down, and struck his crimsoning face with a grimy fist, screaming, “Where’s that man? Where’s that man? Now you’re going home. Now the man’s coming. He’s coming Sunday. Who’s coming Sunday?” Dr Witmer, in an attempt to divert him along the line of his interest, handed him the pegs to count. Obadiah, pushing them away, shrieked irrelevantly, “Mrs. Peter’s went over to her room. Where’s John?” An insistent question, “How many pegs did you count on the board? ” however, brought out of the wild screaming, the surprisingly accurate recollection, “Firty-six.” “How many feet has the horse?” “Four,” he wailed. “A pig has four feet. How many feet have three pigs?” “Twelve,?twelve feet,” yelled Obadiah. Obadiah’s attention was now caught, and in response to Dr. Witmer’s quiet, emphatic repetition of his command, he jammed the pegs into place with an excess of energy, crying all the time, “Be a good boy. Den you’re going home.” “Now take them all out again and then you may go home.” Dr Witmer commanded.
Obadiah snatched at the pegs frantically, still shrieking, “Den you’re going home.” So, with tear-stained, grimy face, and a rumpled Sunday suit, Obadiah left the clinic on the first day.
Two days later he came again, white, immaculate, and solemn. On this second afternoon, he proved himself as good an arithmetician as ever. The six table he had forgotten, but worked it out again rapidly from the peg board. Of course untaught, he could not tell how many were eight sixes, and one would not expect that Dr Witmer’s direction to “add two more sixes to thirty-six” could mean anything to a six-year-old. Obadiah, however, swift to catch from the slightest clue a method of calculation, counted immediately by skips and jumps from thirty-six to forty-eight, using no check but the nervous weaving of his fingers.
For the performance tests, and for objects presented to him for observation and identification, he cared no more than on the previous day. After he had put the blocks in the formboard in fifty-seven seconds, he would have nothing further to do with the board. With the Witmer cylinders, he fooled aimlessly, talking all the while; “Where’s grandmuvver? Is grandmuvver taking the train?” Five of the wooden block letters he named several times but after110 THE PSYCHOLOGICAL CLINIC. ward often miscalled them. When left to himself, he arranged these letters in a precise row, murmuring, “That’s Firty-fourth. That’s Poplar St. That’s Twelfth and Susquehanna. That’s Tenth and Diamond. That’s the bridge. Sit dere. Broke his leg off. Broke his leg off. Mrs. Peters did.” All the time his arms and legs wriggled and his face wrinkled nervously. He refused to look at pictures, till the glimpse of a sheep started him off on “Heavenly Fawer, great and good, we fank vee for our daily food.” After much uneasy wriggling, and resistance to both command and decoy, Obadiah suddenly dodged and ran to his father, yelling, “Safe journey. You buy croquettes on Glenecke.” At Dr Witmer’s request, therefore, both parents left the room. Their going, as was expected, precipitated precisely the sort of scene which had made it impossible to keep Obadiah in the special class. For one half hour, Dr Witmer held him firmly between his knees, while Obadiah yelled in a high sing-song,?
“Where’s muwer? Favver and muvver didn’t go home. You will be a good boy. After a wh-i-i-le, after a wh-i-i-le. Where did favver go? Downstairs, downstairs. Obadiah close his eyes and den Dr Witmer goes away. He does go away.”
Gradually Obadiah’s shriek was modulated to a chant. He intoned his repetitive phrases as though the release of that much energy in a volume of sound gave him extraordinary pleasure. “Dr Witmer will go out. Den you’ll be fawer’s boy. Grandmuwer’s gone to Elizabethtown. Where’s favver? After a wh-i-i-le, very soon, very soon, next Monday. Dr Witmer’s going away. Muwer’s gone to the Ladies’ A-A-A-id, muvver’s gone to the La-a-a-dies’ A-A-A-A-id. Grandmuwer’s gone to Elizabethtown. Let’s a-a-11 go to Elizabethtown.”
At the end of a little space of quiet, Obadiah continued, alternating rapidly between resentful bawling and a smiling yodel, “Muvver and favver went in dere. They did. The bridge isn’t at Ninth St. They went to Firty-fourth St.?they did. The bridge is right here. They did go under the bridge. What’s Obadiah going to have for his supper?”
These long and resonant wailings gradually died away till Obadiah became calm enough to put the pegs in the peg board. As he worked he sang, “And den the long while will be up. When’s Dr Witmer not going to have you? After a wh-i-i-le, after a while. The bridge must be at Twelfth St. Finish your job. Den Obadiah’s going home.”
This hopeful chant was broken into by Dr Witmer’s unpleasant statement, “No, then I’m going to give you another job.”
A NUMERCIAL OBSESSION. Ill
Obadiah did not protest. Instead, he sang out, “Dr Witmer’s going to buy another job at Wanamaker’s.” “Where is Wanamaker’s?” Dr Witmer asked. “At Twelfth St.,” Obadiah chanted. “At Twelfth and what?” “Twelfth and Market,” sang Obadiah. “It’s at Thirteenth and Market Sts.,” Dr Witmer corrected. Obadiah, without remark, went on with his work, but as he pressed the last peg into place he said tersely, “It’s at Firteenth and Market St.”
The child was now in fairly good rapport for work. His actions seemed, for the first time, subject to the will of the examiner, and the direction of his attention determined somewhat by another’s suggestion, and not wholly by his own obsession. He would now give his attention to the colored pegs, and showed adequate discrimination for the four colors,?red, yellow, green, and greenish blue. The calm of exhaustion, and this new acquiescence in work which was not numerical, was disturbed only temporarily, when Dr. Witmer’s withdrawal, which had been so hopefully anticipated in the earlier lamentations, brought from Obadiah wails quite as loud, if not as long, as had the disappearance of “fawer” and “muvver.” When this last outburst subsided, he showed some slight interest in the design blocks?enough to learn by patient teaching and urging to construct the “checked square,” to turn the proper surfaces for the “square within a square,” and after first making a diagonal stripe instead, to place correctly, with some urging, the two upper blocks of the square. Then, when the examiner looked away, he quietly reached over, and stole the two lower blocks from the pattern she had set, and placed them to complete his own.
Exhausted by his futile lamentations, Obadiah had yielded to the native suggestibility which, no less than the hysterical resistance, was inherent in his nervous, overwrought organism. Types of behavior are determined, in part, by the mutual adaptation which is constantly taking place between the human organism and its environment. In the laboratory, Obadiah found an environment which remained constant in spite of the vociferous assault he made upon it by the method which had succeeded so well at home. Since the environment would not change, his behavior must. Two weeks later, therefore, a quieter and more obedient child appeared before the clinic class.
Instead of breaking into lamentation, Obadiah repeated Dr. Witmer’s direction to his father, “Favver, go down stairs,” and, as he watched the door close, remarked laconically, “Favver went downstairs.” Objects and animals, he named, not always accurately, since he called apples “cranberries,” but well enough to eliminate the suspicion of name aphasia as a factor in the meagerness of the ideas he expressed. In subtracting he was less accurate than on previous days, but he recalled the six table over the two weeks’ interval without further coaching.
He gave, on this afternoon, a demonstration of his unusual capacity for persistent concentration when his attention was occupied with the manipulation of numbers. Dr Witmer asked him, “How many are twelve from forty-six?” As Obadiah started to count backward Dr Witmer interrupted with a second question, “How many pegs are there in the board?” Obadiah stopped his count just long enough to reply, “Firty-six,” and without confusion, continued his subtraction till he arrived at the proper answer to the first problem, “Firty-four.”
In these three successive examinations in the month before he came to us in the country, Obadiah thus showed himself to be a child with a distinctly abnormal behavior, an hysterical organism capable of modification by discipline, a marked numerical obsession, and a genuine congenital aptitude for arithmetical processes. The quality of this latter talent, implying, as we have seen, the possession of considerable persistent analytic concentration of attention, certain specific memories, and, within a narrow range, logical association and a capacity for synthesis, was such as to make tentative the diagnosis of high grade imbecility which would otherwise have been given positively on the basis of Obadiah’s general inefficiency and abnormal behavior.
This analytic diagnosis, it will be observed, was made, not on the basis of any “point system” for measuring intelligence, but as the judgment of trained psychologists upon their total observations of the behavior of the child. At the time of these clinic examinations, this behavior was too erratic and undisciplined to make possible, even if it had been considered essential, the giving of a series of tests such as the Binet Scale. The rating of Obadiah’s response to the Stanford Revision of the Binet Scale three months later, when “educational rapport” had been established, strikingly illustrates how, in certain exceptional cases, the indiscriminate acceptance of the technical rating might lead to a false diagnosis. The Mental Age of 5 years and 6 months, and the Intelligence Quotient of 91.6, which, according to rule, would place Obadiah well in the normal group were not a valid index of his general intelligence level. In this case, the significant factors to be considered in interpreting the results were the very wide distribution of his successes between a basal age of 3 years and a terminal age of 9 years (3 years-fIV V VI VII VIII IX 10 mo. +2 mo.+6 mo. +8 mo.+2 mo.+2 mo. = 5 years and 6 months), the crazy, hysterical manner in which he responded to many of the tests, and the fact that the mental capacities which weighted his low basal age of 3 years to a normal level were chiefly his abnormal numerical ability and his subnormal subjection to the habit of echolalia.
Obadiah’s specific talent easily won him credit through the higher levels by his successes in counting objects, in reciting lists of days and months, in naming coins, in numbering his fingers, and in repeating digits up to 5 digits forward and 3 backward. He did not, however, know the value of the stamps, nor seem to understand the situation in the problems of making change, though in the same week he solved mentally problems which appeared to demand as high a degree of comprehension. The condition of uninhibited reflex discharge between the auditory apperception of words and the speech mechanism also gave him credit in the repetition of sentences up to 16-18 syllables.
On the other hand, the hysterical inability we had observed in him to choose between two alternatives made Obadiah fail on all the tests of discrimination. He made no choice even when he seemed to make the discrimination, as in the case of the two lines which, with his curious interest in estimating length and quantity, he measured carefully with two fingers spaced as a one-inch rule. With the lines, the weights, the choice between right and left, and in aesthetic comparison, he merely sang in a high key, “This one,? that one,?this one,?that one.” In comprehension, and in the description of pictures, he barely passed at the 3 year level.
What must you do: when you are sleepy? “Go to sleep.” when you are cold? “Go out.” Why? “Because you play.” when you are hungry? “Eat.” if it is raining? “Play out.” if you find the house on fire? “Burn.” if you miss your car? “Somefing. Nofing.” In two pictures he enumerated three objects with an erratic, staccato inflection; there was no indication of even the beginning of an impulse to describe. In the mutilated pictures he saw nothing at all lacking. Because of deficiency in expression, he fell short, too, of passing the definition test. Chair. He pointed to a chair but would say nothing. 114 THE PSYCHOLOGICAL CLINIC. Horse. He pointed out of the window, saying, “A horse is out dere?what you go on a pony ride.” Fork. “To eat,?to put it away.” Doll. “A doll,?a baby doll. It’s a doll.” Pencil. “To write.”
Table. ” It’s on the table. It’s downstairs where we eat.” This test made upon a child we knew and studied is an instance to point the conclusion that some qualitative analysis of the responses and the consideration of the type and distribution of the successes is as essential to the correct interpretation of the results of a Binet Test as the computation of the technical Mental Age and Intelligence Quotient.
In the school, Obadiah found the same inflexible environment that he had encountered at the laboratory, and quickly responded to it. In the tone of his mother’s coaxings and tentative commands, he had caught instinctively the suggestion of the disobedience which she had come, half tearfully, to expect. To the implication of a command given with the expectation of obedience he reacted quite as consistently, so that this child who had baffled father, mother, grandmother, and teachers, almost at once responded with Teuton alacrity to the voice of authority irrespective of its source. The imperious commands of twelve-year-old Joan he sometimes obeyed even more implicitly than the milder directions of a teacher, and again and again, he climbed down promptly from his own velocipede when three-year-old Jimmie said peremptorily, “Get off.” Deliberate refusal to obey directions practically disappeared inside of a week. Sometimes he would declare rebelliously, “Obadiah’s not going to jump anovver time,” but he always did.
Of course, Obadiah did not become a model child overnight. There were a few important points upon which he held out. For instance, he had decided views upon the diet proper to his constitution?no milk, no cereal, few vegetables, a great deal of pie and fruit, and eggs only when scrambled. To the surprise of his parents, he accepted with good grace, after a fortnight’s struggle, a menu which did not respect this diet list. On one point alone Obadiah won out. The heart of no teacher was stony enough to withstand the appeal of the wrinkled agony of his scarlet face, as, morning after morning, he tried to swallow a boiled egg.
His convictions upon the promptness with which meals should be served were quite as decided. If supper were two minutes behind schedule, he screamed and jumped hysterically. Five long, agonizing minutes of sitting quietly upon a chair while he listened to the tempting sounds of other children already eating in the next room followed each outburst till he learned that such scenes postponed rather than hastened “Obadiah’s supper.” Therefore, he usually repressed the demonstrations of his impatience, although whenever a meal was delayed he could not conceal the nervous restiveness with which his whole organism fairly fluttered. No matter how early we started on an afternoon walk, he was tormented with a frantic fear that we would not return in time for supper. With an air of, “Let’s get this over as soon as possible,” he trudged along steadily, and if we stopped to pick flowers, or to sit by the creek, he could scarcely repress his nervous, shrieking protest. When, at last, we reached home he would run ahead of all the children through the opening in the hedge, and as the teacher followed him up the wide, white steps, feel for her wrist watch with fluttering fingers. ” It’s quarter of six. You’ve been out how long? You’ve been out since quarter of five. You’ve been out one hour. You’re going to eat supper in a quarter of an hour?no,?more,?supper’s at half past. In free quarters of an hour Obadiah’s going to eat supper. Free quarters of an hour is forty-five minutes.”
This hysteria over the meal hour was not due to hunger or to his love of food, but to a strange passion for promptness, and an obsession for computation. Once, when Obadiah was sick in bed, his dinner tray was brought to him at ten minutes of one. He refused to touch it before one o’clock, the scheduled hour for dinner. Obadiah always welcomed his father with the cordial question, “What time is favver going?” He spent the visit in computing the constantly decreasing interval, so that the moment of separation brought from him, not a wail of protest, but a sigh of relief from the tension of suspense.
Whenever Obadiah went upstairs to take a “little west” the conversation was limited strictly to hours and minutes. “Free o’clock,” he said, “How long is Obadiah going to west? Two hours and fifty minutes?” When he was called, he remarked, “Obadiah’s getting up at five o’clock. Two hours. Yesterday you got up at ten minutes of six.” On the ninth day of May he announced,” You’ve been here fifty-seven days,”?an absolutely accurate statement. Because of the nervous imperiousness which this passion for computation had roused in him, we tried rather futilely to keep material for calculation away from him. Nevertheless, one afternoon at rest hour,?on the tenth of April,?I yielded to the temptation to try Obadiah out on a problem that I thought would “stump” him. I was also curious to find out whether he had any idea of counting above a hundred.
It was five minutes after three. I showed him my watch and said, “You are going to rest until half past five. How long is that?” “Two hours and a half,” he replied, making an error of five minutes.
“How many minutes will that be?” I asked. Obadiah ran his fingers rapidly round and round the dial, counting by fives in a half whisper. “One hundred and sixty minutes,” he answered, after a little. “You are wrong, Obadiah.” I said. Obadiah returned to the problem, not failing to note without suggestion that two minutes had elapsed during the previous calculation. “Seven minutes after free,” he murmured; and then he counted round the dial, this time by tens, to 160, and thence backward rapidly, 159?158?157?to 153, “One hundred and fiftyfree minutes.” The correct answer, of course, was 143. ” Try again,” I urged. Before he completed this third count it was ten minutes after three, so that his answer, “one hundred and forty minutes,” was correct.
This problem really hit Obadiah’s intelligence level. He had to think, and to think hard to solve it, but given time and trials enough he was able to do it. On the twenty-fourth of May, before the clinic class at the University, Obadiah made a similar calculation. “What time is it by my watch?” Dr Witmer asked him. “Eight minutes after two.” “When do you have supper?” “Six-firty.” “How many minutes is it to supper, then?” After an inaudible calculation, Obadiah said, “Four hours and twenty-two minutes.”
Dr Witmer was about to pass on to other work when Obadiah continued, “How long is four hours?” “All right, go ahead.” Dr Witmer encouraged him. “Four hours, 240 minutes,” said Obadiah after an interval. “And how many minutes altogether?” asked Dr Witmer. “Two hundred and sixty-two.” It was difficult, too, to keep the other children from exploiting Obadiah’s talent. We had had no indication that he understood the concepts of seconds or of halves, or the principle of division. Just before supper on the twenty-ninth of May, one of the older boys was heard to ask Obadiah, ” How many minutes in 120 seconds?” Obadiah answered without hesitation, “Two minutes.” “How many seconds in ten minutes?” William continued. “Six hundred.”
Joan broke into the dialogue, asking a question she could not herself answer,?”How many half seconds in ten minutes?” Almost immediately this astonishing child replied, “Twelve hundred.” I give the dates of these conversations because it is my opinion? one which it is obviously impossible to verify?that in February at the laboratory he could not have solved problems of such complexity. I believe that in spite of our efforts to suppress his impulse to count and to calculate, by virtue of incessant exercise and his ability to acquire the application of a new method from a single illustration, Obadiah’s performance level in numerical processes was rising with extraordinary rapidity. It is small wonder that, with his mind so persistently occupied with numbers, he was receptive of little else in his environment. To questions that did not have to do with number or food, it was difficult to get from him anything but random answers. This was due, not so much to incapacity to understand or to perceive, nor to deficiency in attention, but, I believe, to his failure to direct his very excellent faculty of attention to objects other than number. When Obadiah was asked, “Obadiah, where are your garters?” he sang vaguely, “Over dere.” “Where are they, Obadiah?” ” Downstairs?downstairs.” “Nonsense, where are they?” Thus stimulated by repeated questions to attend to the matter in hand, he clutched frantically at his trouser leg, exclaiming, “In here,” and shortly pulled them out at the bottom. Once he forgot to take off his sweater. ” Obadiah, what have you on that you don’t wear in the house?” “Somefing.” To a repetition of the question, he answered, “Nofing.” “What have you on that you ought to take off?” “Pants,” in a sing-song tone. At length, he said “Sweater,” whereupon he took it off, carried it over to the hat rack, and laid it on top of his coat, ejaculating under his breath, “Dere.” Once he wandered out of bounds.” “Obadiah, why did you go into the front yard?” “Because you were in the front yard.” “WHY were you there?” “Because you asked Kafryn what time it was.” “Yes, but WHY?” “Because it was ten minutes of eleven, because John is in that room, because it was about one minute ago.” If he chanced, on the other hand, to be interested, he could reply very precisely. At the dinner table Miss M. removed a seed from a Malaga grape and gave the grape to Obadiah. “What did I give you, Obadiah?” she asked. ” A grape wiv one seed gone.” Ordinarily, however, his conversation was no more coherent than the following dialogue: “When is your birthday, Obadiah?” (It was in June.) “December fifth,” he answered promptly, but vaguely. “The fifth of December?” in a tone of surprise. “No, the first,” said Obadiah. “Oh, December first.” “No,” he shifted with a silly giggle, “December last.” “What did you do on your birthday?” “Played wiv toys, twelve toys, twenty-four toys.” “What else did you do?” “Took a little walk with favver to the Christmas tree.” “What was on the Christmas tree?” “Two leaves.”
Nevertheless, nervous, incoherent, obsessed by number though he was, during the spring there was some slight change in Obadiah in the direction of normality. With the fresh air of which he had had little, and the wholesome diet which he had refused at home, his pale cheeks grew pink, and his thin, soft-skinned body plumper. In the first twelve days he gained a pound and a quarter in weight, and something, too, in energy. He would take off his outdoor clothes including rubbers, and undress himself at night. Never, however, did he learn to put his clothes on. On the playground, he watched a little less, and moved about a little more. He could not skip or hop, but after a little, he would sometimes run in a funny, stiff, feeble way. Though he did not play he began to “mix” with the children. He liked to swing with Joan, to be tossed about by William. Once, when little Jimmie was playing horse, Obadiah straddled a stick solemnly, and walked up and down, with the remark, “Obadiah’s horse is going to Philadelphia.” Still, he took no part in active play. He could not even learn readily a simple game of catch with a ball. Each time he tossed the ball up instead of out, so that it always fell beside him. He could not hit the trunk of a large tree from a distance of twelve inches. Instead of catching the ball he would hold his hands up close to his chin to fend it off, as though afraid it would hit his face. He never ran after the ball when it rolled away unless he was explicitly told to do so, and then often threw it in a direction that was altogether away from the person with whjom he was playing.
It was an evening early in May that I first saw Obadiah play with something, a toy balloon we had brought him from the circus. The crimson ball was large enough for him to catch easily in his two weak, baby hands, and so light that he had no fear of its touching his face. The game was pure pleasure. With the bright, floating ball, he got the forward throwing movement without trouble. If he failed to catch it in his turn, he would scramble after it, come back to his place all by himself, and toss it again to his partner. He played with it thus, gleefully, till half after seven, when the air came out of the balloon with a low hiss. With keen interest, Obadiah watched me blow the air into the limp red bag, and saw its resurrection in a somewhat smaller ball.
The next morning, soon after eight, the red balloon tumbled into my lap over the top of the morning paper, and an eager, pinkcheeked Obadiah peered round the newspaper, hoping to lure me into another game. Yet even at the moment of this new and fascinating play, he relapsed into a characteristic soliloquy: “About fourteen hours ago I” (he always used the first person to designate the person addressed and reserved the second person for reference to himself) “I put the air in your balloon again. Yesterday you lay down at ten minutes after two. You got up at half-past five. Ten minutes after free, ten minutes after four, ten minutes after five, free hours. Free hours, one hundred and eighty, 180?190?200, two hundred minutes. You lay down two hundred minutes.” In the schoolroom, Obadiah was an extraordinarily difficult child, not because he offered any active resistance, but because he would not put his attention upon any task, and so failed to use the mental capacity he possessed.
On the morning of March 14th, the day he first came into our household, he seemed quite unable to put together a simple sliced animal of three pieces?a cow. He put the W strip directly beneath the C strip, and ignored the body of the animal altogether. Miss B. showed him carefully how to place the three strips, calling attention to each part, but Obadiah again slid the pieces into random position with legs at the top of the picture, and the truncated head at the base. Three days later, when his response to the atmosphere of quiet discipline made his reactions more controlled, he put the cow and the cat together in less than one minute each, and the horse with its five strips a little more slowly. He copied, too, several fourblock designs quite readily. This work Obadiah did in a bored and disinterested manner as though he were submitting to the inevitable. Gradually, however, interest in counting the number of animals he had put together developed in him a salutary pride in accomplish120 THE PSYCHOLOGICAL CLINIC. ment. Two weeks later, as Miss B., after a half hour’s absence, opened the door of her room, a little drab figure scrambled up from the floor, a bit flushed, to make the proud announcement, “You put twelve animals tog ever.” These included long and difficult animals like the kangaroo, the squirrel, and the elephant; yet Obadiah, who, at the University, unwilling either to look or to think, had called a cat a “chicken,” could name them all, and would not only put them together separately, but sort out the pieces when the entire dozen were mixed in a scattered pile. He worked quietly unless, for a moment, one piece seemed to be missing; then he burst into loud screams, “Where is it? Where is it?”
Obadiah also learned to put picture puzzles together much more quickly than his first performance led us to expect. Miss B. gave him seven of the large pieces in the Little Boy Blue Puzzle. He disregarded the picture entirely, put the feet where the head belonged, and after working away for fifteen minutes by trial and error, leaving a piece wherever its form would permit it to fit, he showed no improvement. This was on the 21st of March. The next day he put three pieces together properly, and after four trials, all seven, but he would do this only when told to pick up each separate piece. After daily practice, he was able, on the 27th of March, when continuously urged, to complete the whole puzzle of fifteen pieces. In the next two days he added Little Red Riding Hood to his repertoire. By April 30th, spurred by his ambition to make his list of successes longer, he put three puzzles together without help. He also condescended, to string colored beads, because he could count them as they slipped over the needle.
To teach Obadiah to read was of the first importance in his school work. In the two weeks just before he came, his father, by a piece of very successful teaching, had taught him to name all but four of the capital letters, and all but five of the type letters. Nevertheless, Miss B., who has had splendid experience and success in teaching very young and very backward children to read, declares that with the exception of two low-grade imbeciles who could not be taught to read at all, Obadiah was the hardest child she ever tried to teach. He was utterly bored, would not look at the book unless his attention was recalled to each separate word, refused to look at a three letter word long enough to spell it, flinging out a random guess after a mere glance, and showed no sign of associating any meaningful mental content with the words. In a slow, dull, colorless monotone, constantly goaded by, “Go on. Say the next word,” the reading dragged along, dispiriting mechanical drudgery to both pupil and teacher.
Four weeks from March 19th, the day on which he first learned the word MAN and on the following day hopelessly confused it with RAN, Obadiah read at the University in a demonstration before the clinic class, “I?see?a?can.” “Spell it,” said Dr Witmer. “C-A-T, Cat.” “What’s the next word?” “S-E-E, Me.” ” S-E-E doesn’t spell ME. It’s SEE. What’s this word? ” “R-A-N, Ran.” ” It isn’t N. What is that letter? ” “R-A-T. Rat.” On the sixteenth Miss B. wrote in despair, “I must have gone too quickly in reading for Obadiah. He is now up to the eighth page in Monroe’s Primer, but it isn’t possible to be more confused than he is over the nine words he has learned. I shall begin at the beginning and keep at two or three words until he seems sure of them.” On the thirtieth, the outlook was still dark. ” It seems impossible really to get ahead in reading. He doesn’t exert himself; he doesn’t remember words; and he confuses them. He is more trying to teach than any child I have ever taught. You accomplish next to nothing with him. If he wasn’t able to tell time to the minute on a small wrist watch I would think he couldn’t see well.”
In May, fortunately, he made a little more progress, so that on the twenty-fourth, when he again appeared at the University he had covered twenty-five pages in the Monroe Primer though he had by 110 means mastered them. Before the class he read several sentences.
After he had read the first, “I can run,” he looked to Dr Witmer for the customary urging. Failing to receive it, Obadiah himself supplied the admonishment, “Go ahead,” before he continued, “See me run. It is fun, fun, fun. Hop and hop, run and run. The sun is up.” To the onlookers, Dr Witmer remarked, “This reading is the result of a very great deal of intensive work.” “Yes,” volunteered Obadiah, much to the amusement of the class. While Obadiah showed no interest in letters and words, and forgot them with discouraging facility, a number, of course, he never failed to notice, and rarely forgot. I remember him as he sat quietly on my lap one June evening, playing with a small signet ring. 122 THE PSYCHOLOGICAL CLINIC. “It belongs on this finger,” I told him. “The others are all too big.” “Yes,” he agreed sympathetically, “Nine of them are too big.” After a moment, as he slipped the ring on my little finger, he seemed to recall that, once, some three months before, he had heard my age mentioned. With intent scrutiny, he bent his smooth brown head over the finger, murmuring, “This is twenty-six years old.” With deliberate interest, he examined each finger in turn with the same disquieting comment for each, “And this one is twenty-six years old.” The child’s interest in numbers and his native capacity for computation impressed us as so phenomenal that for one week in June, the month of Obadiah’s sixth birthday, Dr Witmer, for the purposes of investigation, partially lifted the ban upon stimulating him to exercise his talent. During that one week, for something less than half an hour each day, I plied Obadiah with questions in arithmetic, never teaching, aiming solely to explore this singular gift to its limits. I listened with such amazement to the responses which, in so many instances, transcended our most extravagant suspicions of his ability, and I now reread the reports of the examination with such a renewal of incredulous surprise, that I shall transcribe verbatim a large part of the records. June 9th.
Q. How many seconds are there in 140 minutes? A. Obadiah counted rapidly by 60’s, “60?120?180”?silence? “free hundred”?long concentrated silence?”eighty-two hundred seconds.” The correct answer was 8400. June 10th. Inside of fifteen minutes. Q. How many seconds in 50 minutes? A. After silent calculation during which his fingers did not move), “Firty hundred.” Q. In 5 minutes? A. “Free hundred.” Q. In 12 minutes? A. 720. Q. In 23 minutes? A. “Firteen hundred and eighty.” Q. In 63 minutes? A. “Firty-seven hundred and eighty.” Q. In 27 minutes? A. Sixteen hundred and twenty. Q. How many hours in 3 days? A. 96. Q. You are wrong.
He counted again, his fingers entirely still, his body motionless except for the curious impression he gave of some inner muscular movement within that smooth round head of his, “72.” Q. How many hours in a week? He counted under his breath, 24?48?96, but could not proceed. He seemed to have discovered that doubling is a practical short cut. It must require some complexity of attention and recall to add two twenty-fours to his count when he doubles 48. Q. How many hours in 5 days? A. 48?96?98?100?110?112?114?116?118?120. Q. How many hours than are there in a week? He started at 120, then calculated thus: “120, 140, and 4, 144, that’s six days”: then a silence, out of which came, finally, “168.” Q. If Miss M. had 100 apples and gave away 50, how many would she have left? A. (Instantly) 50. Q. If you had 90 cents, spent 10 cents, and lost 4 cents, how much would you have left? He calculated slowly, “90?10, that’s 80?78?76?76 cents.” Q. If one apple costs 5 cents what will 5 apples cost? He counted by fives to 25. Q. If one apple costs 6 cents, what will 7 apples cost? He counted by sixes to 18, by ones on his fingers to 24, then was silent with fingers still till he said finally, “Forty-two cents.” Q. There are 365 days in one year. How many in two years? (He could not do this example.)
Later in the day, inside of ten minutes, he answered the following questions: Q. There are 3 feet in one yard. How many in 26 yards? He counted by 3’s to 18, by ones to 24, then was silent a long time, moving his fingers only part of the time. Finally he answered “78,” but did not know whether it was yards, feet, or apples. Q. If one yard of cloth costs 15 cents, how much will four yards cost? He doubled rapidly, “15, 30, Sixty!” Q. Sixty what? A. Sixty feet. Q. No. A. Oh, sixty cents. Q. If one barrel of apples cost $8, what would 6 barrels cost? A. He doubled 8, then 16 to “firty-two,” and was silent till he said, “48 cents.” Q. If 5 pencils cost 25 cents, how much will one cost? A. 20 cents. Q. NO, and I repeated the question. A. 26 cents. Q. No, and again I repeated it. A. Oh, 5 cents. Q. If 6 sticks of candy cost 12 cents, what will one stick cost? A. “Two cents,” instantly. Q. If 8 sticks cost 24 cents, etc. He could not answer this. June 11th; One-half hour. 124 THE PSYCHOLOGICAL CLINIC. Hoping to find something he could not do, I tried Obadiah on simple fractions. Q. What is of 4? A. One. Q. No, $ of 4 is 2. What is of 8? A. 4 (instantly). Q. What is of 10? A. 5. Q. 20? A. 10. Q. 100? A. 50. Q. 200? A. 100. Q. 24? A. 12. Q. 30? A. 15. Q. 60? A. 30. Q. 48? A. 24. Q. 72? A. “Firty-six.” Q. 94? A. 47 (about one minute). Q. 86? A. 43 (about one minute). Q. 108? A. 54 (about one minute). Q. Ten hundred and two? A. 501 (about one minute.) Q. Sixteen hundred ninety-six. A. 847 (about two minutes). Q. No. A. 848. Q. What is f of 6. A. 3. Q. No, ? of 6 is 2. What is | of 9? A. 4?5. Q. No, ? of 9 is 3. What is ^ of 12? A. 4. Q. What is ? of 21? A. 5?10. Q. No, | of 21 is 7. What is f of 27? A. 9. Q. What is ^ of 30? A. 10. Q. 60? A. 20. Q. 93? A. 31 (about one minute). Q. 105? A. 42 (failed after several trials). Q. of 7? A. “Free and a half.” Q. $of 29? A. 14i Q. of 103? A. 51? (about half a minute). Q. of eighty-two hundred and eleven. A. “Forty-one hundred and five and a half,” he said after three minutes of absolute silence during which his body was quiet and his face tense, as though a machine were steadily and swiftly ticking something off somewhere behind his gray eyes and broad forehead. Q. What is of 10? A. “4-3?3- 4-4. What is it? Oh, free and a half.” Q. No, of 10 is 3^ of 16? A. 5|. Q. No. A. 5i Q. What is $ of 25? A. 8f. Q. What is ? of 216? A. 108. Q. No. A. (Failed after much thought.) A NUMERICAL OBSESSION. 125 Q. What is f of 8? A. 4. Q. No, J of 8 is 2. What is of 20? A. 6. Q. No. A. 5. Q. What is of 16? A. (Failed.) Q. of 16 is 4. I of 12? A. 3. Q. What is | of 36? A. 30. Q. No. A. (Counted audibly by fours, but couldn’t get it.) Q. What is 1 of 24? A. 5. Q. No. A. (Failed.)
Dr Witmer had said to the clinic class in April that he believed he could teach Obadiah the multiplication tables in a month but that he was not going to, because he did not think it would be good for the child. I suspected that Obadiah had stolen a march on Dr. Witmer and had taught himself the tables. Therefore, in the next two days, I ran through the multiplication tables with Obadiah. At first I tried a dozen combinations chosen at random. Half of them (5X12, 3X7, 4X10, etc.) he knew instantly; the other half he answered correctly on the second trial, often getting the answer by counting. I then carried him systematically through the tables from two to eleven, taking each table by itself, but skipping from point to point within the table.
I found that he knew a very large number of the combinations, and could count the rest out quickly. He knew all the combinations in the two table instantly without error; all of them in the three table except three nines, which he got by counting by ones from 18, and three elevens, which he reached by doubling 11 to 22 and thence by ones to 33. In the four table, he counted, with only one initial error, five twos by 2, five fours by 4, five sevens, five eights, and five sixes by a mixed count, largely ones, and failed on five elevens; in the six table he counted six nines by nines and ones, six sixes, and six sevens chiefly by ones, was very slow in computing six eights, and failed on six elevens; in the seven table, he named only three instantly, but counted out all the others successfully, with but three initial errors. He gave the eight, nine, ten, and eleven tables in about five minutes for each table, counting out most of the answers, and failing to give a correct answer on the first trial in not more than two instances in each table.
June 12th. Q. What is of 911? A. 455^ (less than half a minute). Q. | of 4? A. ” One and a what? One and a fird.” Q. * of 11? A. 3i Q. No, 3 and ?, ^ of 12? A. 4. Q. of 22? A. 7. 126 THE PSYCHOLOGICAL CLINIC. Q. ? of 35? A. Ill Q. | of 595? A. (Failed.) Q. | of 101? A. (Failed.) Q. What is ? of 75? A. (Failed.) Q. I of 8? A. 2?. Q. No, it is 2. What is j of 12? A. 3. Q. of 20? A. 5. Q. | of 32? A. 15. Q. No, it is 8. What is of 24? A. 6. Q. of 48? A. (Failed.) June 18th. Q. What is of seventy-seven hundred and fifty-nine? Obadiah’s face grew very tense. He became desperate and cried, “What is it? What did I say?” Q. Seventy-seven hundred and fifty-nine. After a long intense silence, he said, “Firty-eight hundred. Seventy-seven hundred and what?” Q. Seventy-seven hundred and fifty-nine. After some time he said, “Twenty-nine and a half. How many hundred? Oh, firty-five hundred, and twenty-nine and a half.” Q. What is ^ of 18?. A. 6. Q. 36? A. 12. Q. 48? A. 24. Q. Wrong. A. 16. Q. What is of 813? A. 406? (about half a minute). Q. of 765? A. 382^- (in one minute). Q. of ninety-four hundred and twenty-seven. A. “Fortyseven hundred and firteen and a half” (3 minutes). June lJfth. Q. If it takes you two days to travel 700 miles, how many can you travel in one day? A. After a minute’s thought, “About free hundred and fifty.” I thought he had never heard the word thousand. Q. How many hundreds are there in one thousand? A. Ten. Q. In three thousand? A. Firty. Q. In four thousand five hundred? A. 45. Q. Ten times 25? A. 250 (in less than one minute). Q. Six times 50? A. 300. Q. Seven times 56? A. “Two fifty-sixes,?what is that?” He counted rapidly, “112?Seven fifty-sixes.” He counted inaudibly to “304.” When told it was wrong, he said after a little, “292.” When I again said, A NUMERICAL OBSESSION. 127 “No,” Obadiah grew very excited, “Den I s’ all tell you,” he begged irresistibly, “How many is that?” Q. What is half of eighty-six hundred and seventeen? A. “Forty-free hundred and eight and a half” (after an interval of less than one minute). Q. What is of one thousand two hundred and fifty? A. 525. Q. No. A. 625.
This was a little round-headed child who would not celebrate his sixth birthday for two weeks, and had never been taught an hour’s arithmetic in his life. Here he sat, counting, counting, counting,? by ones, by twos, by threes, by fives, by tens, by twenty-fours, by forty-eights, by sixties, by hundreds. He did not calculate in figures; in school, they interested him no more than letters. For Obadiah, numbers were not figures, but units, and down that everfascinating, ever-lengthening, infinite series he could, in time, count his way to the solution of any problem.
Counting, perpetual counting, must be the salient point in this transcript of behavior. Yet I do not wish this to stand alone as the final impression of Obadiah. I cannot let the staunch, independent personality which won affection from us all be lost in the cold category of a mere mathematical phenomenon. I would rather you forgot a little the picture of the child prodigy in the gray-striped suit, sitting stiffly in the black kindergarten chair, and counting his way, with nervous concentration to the half of eighty-two hundred and eleven. I should prefer to leave with you, instead, the picture of the brown, earnest youngster of the summer on the rocky seacoast of Prince Edward’s Island.
For the whole, long, dusty journey from Philadelphia, in the hottest of June weather, Obadiah was as good as gold. He tolerated even the vagaries of the Canadian railroad as the train lingered overlong in the wide farmlands of New Brunswick, content to criticize without tears, ” When’s the train going? It’s five hours and forty minutes late. It s’ouldn’t take so long to get to Halifax, Nova Scotia.” Never once did he wail, till late at night he was carried across the street from the clanging station at Halifax. There on the steps of the half-darkened hotel he lifted his voice in loud lamentation.
In the invigorating air of St. Margaret’s Bay, sharp with the tang of brine and seaweed, in a country that was new and different and bright with color, Obadiah gained in sturdiness and energy. It was a full mile from the house in the village, around the cove, to the schoolrooms in the long, crude, weather-gray boat-house. Each morning Obadiah, his round legs showing very brown above white socks, would run ahead down the narrow road that wound past the dull, angular, frame houses and the Fish Market Wharf with its smell of fish and wet nets, the flap of blowing canvas, and the creak of wooden vessels against the piles. On around the cove that stirred with the slow, silent life of masted schooners and small fishing craft, he raced, through the gate into the boggy pasture. At the end of the pasture he swung the turnstile with his small, sun-burnt hands, and ran out along the line of hackmatack trees to the gray schoolhouse facing the blue sea and a peninsula of gray rock and green field beyond.
There, with Miss S. as his teacher, in one of the tiny roughfinished class rooms, close to the splash of the water on the stony beach, Obadiah awoke to some interest in reading. At first he cried and giggled foolishly; always he read with extraordinary contortious but with increasing interest and accuracy. Sometimes, he would sit by himself at one of the low, smooth tables of natural wood, industriously studying his words. He always noted the number of the page, saying, 11 must is on firty-seven,” till he met it again on another page, when he amended the statement, 11 must is on firtyseven and firty-nine.” Sometimes of his own accord he would bring the Primer to Miss S. and gently take possession of one of her fingers to guide it along the lines as he read.
He was no longer content to pronounce meaningless words, but in his intent, eager mind, so empty of pictures, he was working to get for himself by dramatization an understanding of the lessons he read. The lesson on page 35, “My cap is in the well. It fell in. It will get wet,” so interested him that he finally exclaimed with decision, “Obadiah s’all get into the well.” Very soberly he put the book on the floor and set his foot upon the picture of the well. Evidently he had an idea why this was not altogether successful, for, when he failed to find himself in the well, he promptly picked up the book and with his two fingers measured the height of the boy in the picture, applying the measure to himself from the top of his head down till he reached an estimate of the comparative scale. His next stage-setting for the lesson was more realistic. He took a hat belonging to one of the boys and deliberately flung it into a ditch of water by the school-house. The wet hat was an entirely satisfactory dramatization. The climax of realism came one day when Dr. Dobb left his hat on the large round table as he passed through the living room. Obadiah looked at the hat for some time. Presently, he got up from his chair, gave the hat a vigorous punch with his fist, and then marched round and round the table in a businesslike way, giving the hat a punch each time he passed it. This extraordinary conduct seemed inexplicable until someone recalled a page in the Primer:
Can Max hit the hat? It is his hat. Hit it, Max, hit it. Hit the hat, Max.
Thus, Obadiah began to take a serious and dramatic interest in reading. Nevertheless, he did not read either easily or accurately, and always, when he returned to the beginning of the book, was found to have forgotten a large proportion of the words. Inapt as he was, as a student of reading, Obadiah unquestionably had a precocious endowment of intellectual curiosity. Almost anything that he noticed presented a problem and tortured him till he had found some solution. When introduced to the sister of one of his teachers, he wrinkled his forehead in perplexity, “Two Miss Carrolls.” In a moment, his forehead cleared, “And two grandmuvvers.” The visitor’s statement that there were “three Miss Carrolls” did not trouble Obadiah, for he had found his comparison: “Free Miss Carrolls and only two grandmuvvers.” Once at least this intellectual curiosity was wholly disassociated from numbers. In the afternoon an alarming shriek, “A-Agnes, A-A-Agnes,” brought the nurse flying to the third floor. Obadiah, when he saw her, cried out as if in agony, “Agnes, why, wh-h-y-y is tapioca yellow?” Throughout the summer, the “lid was down,” in so far as possible, upon all counting. Clocks were put out of sight and wrist watches concealed. At meal time Obadiah would fly down the porch and peer through the kitchen window at the cook’s clock. He gave himself away, however, when he raced back murmuring,” You don’t care if it is 25 minutes of seven.” The face of that clock, too, was covered.
Though minutes were now inaccessible, Obadiah was all the time surreptitiously counting other things. Early in the season he had had to sit a long while on a rock by the peninsula bridge because he had started to cry. When he returned to the spot five weeks later, he reminded Miss C. of the incident by saying: “Firty-seven days ago Obadiah cried here.” Once on the road to school he suddenly laughed aloud and went on down the road chuckling for some time before he shared his joke with the others, “Dere are so many people in Philadelphia that you can’t count them.” He persisted in arranging everything in a numerical series. Even the weekly picnic gave him pleasure only because it added another island to his list. He would sit in his warm tan-colored sweater curled up against the gray gunwale of the Lord Nelson, happily humming “Tipperary” or “Onward, Christian Soldiers.” If he chanced to hear that an island was to be revisited, the humming ceased, and a persuasive disappointed child pleaded with the teachers: “Obadiah s’ant go to Clay Island. You s’all go to the fifteenth island.” One day, William, with boy-like frankness, remarked?”Obadiah, you certainly were a mess when you came to this school.” To which the accused responded characteristically, “A hundred and seventy-six days ago, Obadiah, you were a mess.”
Obadiah took genuine and fearless pleasure in the water. It was a new experience. On the first picnic he walked out from the stony shore in his shoes and stockings. He seemed to realize that it was something he should not do, for he withdrew his wet feet guiltily to the shelter of some shrubs under the tall oaks. When Miss S. called him, he peered out from the bushes, muttering, “You s’ant go near Miss S’annon.” Impressed with this idea that he must not get his clothes wet, the day that he was first buttoned into the ungainly blue jersey bathing suit which reached almost to his ankles, he refused to get wet at all until he was “ducked.” When sent ashore, he snatched off the wet suit as quickly as possible, and appeared before the astonished eyes of the teachers and the skipper of the Lord Nelson, strolling, plump and round and naked, along the yellow crescent of the sandy shore. After that day of initiation, he loved the water, and, time and time again, he was rescued from fearlessly walking out to sea, just as nothing but his round brown head topped the water.
His enjoyment of bathing lasted until someone suggested that this would be a good opportunity to try again to teach Obadiah to dress himself. In one of the plain, unceiled classrooms, Obadiah, aglow from his bath, struggled with his white lisle union suit. He thrust his left foot into the right leg, his right foot into the left leg, then both feet into the same leg. He put it on backwards; he stuck a leg through the armhole, and an arm through the leg opening. Finally, in a frenzy of rage, he shook the suit vehemently over his head, sputtering, “How goes it den?” The next day he remembered the union suit, and said at the bath hour, “Obadiah s’all never go bathing again.”
He did not play with the children. In fact, he felt rather superior. They all liked him, but he paid little attention to them, except in the morning before breakfast when he would try to make them laugh by standing on his head in the wicker chair, with his brown, bobbed hair tumbling about his flushed face. He never dug in the sand, never threw stones in the water. Once he picked up a long rake and raked ineffectually in the grass. This was so unusual that a note was made of it. At recess, he would often run away as far from the children as possible, a little white figure, flying up through the long grass, in and out among the young fruit trees, to the top of the green hillside, where, by the gray rail fence, he stood against the blue sky, the wind from the sea tossing his hair. With the teachers, on the other hand, Obadiah became very sociable. After he had finished a meal with a remark such as, “Obadiah took 92 mousefuls to eat supper,” or “You had 24 raisins in your tart,” he would shove the other children out, and close the door confidentially. Then he would climb into a chair by the long dining-room table, saying with decision: “Obadiah s’all stay here a 1-1-ong time.”
In these daily visits with the teachers, Obadiah began to develop a meager line of thought which was not numerical. One day he began to reflect upon his sins. “Obadiah did five bad sings in Weston,” he said, “You popped your garter. You frew Donald’s cap in the water. You smeared the toose paste. You spilled your doily. You looked at the kitchen clock.” When Miss S. left near the end of the summer he expressed unmistakeable regret. His face was woe-begone and his voice plaintive as he said: “It’s too bad Miss S’annon had to go to Harrisburg. Too bad Miss S’annon stayed only fifty-seven days.”
And a little later, “What will Miss S’annon do in Harrisburg? “Teach little children.” “Den who s’all teach Obadiah?” he inquired anxiously. “Miss B.” Obadiah thought a long time, recalling, perhaps, the unfortunate association of Miss B. with his boredom in the first difficult weeks of uncongenial work. He came to a very definite conclusion, “No. S’es’ant.”
Though this child is a phenomenon, a juvenile mathematical prodigy; though his very talent so retards his general development as to drop him perhaps into the moron class; though, with his incoherence, his obsessions, his reactions of hysteria, he touches, possibly, even, the borders of lunacy, to close the gate of the future to Obadiah by diagnosing and treating him as an imbecile would be unfair to his capacity and to his personality. With his rational gift for computation superior to the mechanical performances of most idiot calculators, with his rare initiative, persistence, and passion in the solution of intellectual problems, with his staunch independence of thought and emotion, he should be given every chance to develop these embryonic impulses toward normal thought and action. We have no records of the childhood of men who have achieved eminence in the science of mathematics. Might not mathematical genius spring from just such a chrysalis?
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