ear 1740. He was a very small baby, weighing not
more than three pounds at birth, but from the first he was sturdy and
healthy. In honour of his maternal grandfather, Sir Hercules Occam of
Bishop's Occam, he was christened Hercules. His mother, like many other
mothers, kept a notebook, in which his progress from month to month was
recorded. He walked at ten months, and before his second year was out
he had learnt to speak a number of words. At three years he weighed but
twenty-four pounds, and at six, though he could read and write perfectly
and showed a remarkable aptitude for music, he was no larger and heavier
than a well-grown child of two. Meanwhile, his mother had borne two
other children, a boy and a girl, one of whom died of croup during
infancy, while the other was carried off by smallpox before it reached
the age of five. Hercules remained the only surviving child.

"On his twelfth birthday Hercules was still only three feet and two
inches in height. His head, which was very handsome and nobly shaped,
was too big for his body, but otherwise he was exquisitely proportioned,
and, for his size, of great strength and agility. His parents, in the
hope of making him grow, consulted all the most eminent physicians of
the time. Their various prescriptions were followed to the letter, but
in vain. One ordered a very plentiful meat diet; another exercise; a
third constructed a little rack, modelled on those employed by the Holy
Inquisition, on which young Hercules was stretched, with excruciating
torments, for half an hour every morning and evening. In the course of
the next three years Hercules gained perhaps two inches. After that his
growth stopped completely, and he remained for the rest of his life a
pigmy of three feet and four inches. His father, who had built the most
extravagant hopes upon his son, planning for him in his imagination
a military career equal to that of Marlborough, found himself a
disappointed man. 'I have brought an abortion into the world,' he would
say, and he took so violent a dislike to his son that the boy dared
scarcely come into his presence. His temper, which had been serene,
was turned by disappointment to moroseness and savagery. He avoided all
company (being, as he said, ashamed to show himself, the father of a
lusus naturae, among normal, healthy human beings), and took to solitary
drinking, which carried him very rapidly to his grave; for the year
before Hercules came of age his fat