those absurd
questions and fantastic notions about the nature of the Deity. It is at
the age of five years, or of six, that the children first start with
such questions and form their own ideas in this field. What had
completely stumped me, what I had been unable to reconcile, had been
these rapid successive changes in The Brain's personality plus the fact
that the infantilism and the childishness of its utterances wouldn't fit
the picture of a brain-power 25,000 times that of a human.

But _if_ I'm right in thinking that The Brain awakened to consciousness
only nine days ago, all these stumbling blocks would disappear at once.
We would arrive at this very simple picture: a mechanical genius has
been "born" into this world, it awakens to consciousness at the age of
18 months, with its tremendous intellectual powers this genius
telescopes the intellectual evolution of years into days, thus it
reaches a mental age of six or seven within a week after its first
awakening to consciousness. Utterly fantastic as this may sound; it
makes sense; it explains the phenomena.

In Prof. Osterkamp's "brain history" I have found interesting examples
that approximations to such rapid intellectual evolutions are indeed
possible even with human beings. From the early Middle Ages to modern
times there is an endless succession of "infant prodigies" whose brains
were artificially overdeveloped and over-stimulated by ruthless
exploiters--often their own parents--with methods of unbelievable
cruelty.

One of the most significant case histories in this respect is that of
the boy Carolus in the city of Luebeck in the 15th century. As an infant
he was sold, as one of many human guinea pigs, to a famous--infamous
alchemist, Wedderstroem, who called himself "Trismegistos" and was
astrologer to king Christian of Denmark. This fellow performed on
Carolus one of those weird operations in which nine out of ten babies
died. He removed the skull-cap of the infant. The unprotected brain was
suspended in an oil-filled vessel. Of course the pathetic child never
could walk or even raise its head. The brain, no longer restrained by
bone matter, outgrew its natural house to at least twice its normal
size, if one is to judge from the picture in the old "historia". At the
age of two his master started teaching Carolus mathematics. At the age
of five Carolus had surpassed his master; there was no mathematical
problem known to the time that he couldn't solve i