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The ''Revue Spirite'' of May gives an account of an extraordinary calculating boy, named Jacques Inodi, ten years of age, and entirely uneducated; his mother died, his father forsook him, and for some time he gained a precarious livelihood by visiting cafés in different towns in the South of France, and showing the visitors his calculating powers. | |||
{{Style S-HPB SB. Continues on|10-355}} | At length the master of a café, at Marseilles, took the boy into his service, to their mutual advantage; now he is at Paris, and it is said that the Anthropological Society is likely to have him educated. | ||
Jacques Inodi was born in Piedmont, in the Province of Coni. He is said to have “an enormous skull, more developed on the right side than on the left.” An assertion fully borne out by his portrait, which is given from a photograph, in the ''Revue'' of April. | |||
A gentleman, named M. George, writing from Marseilles, says: | |||
“Persons who desire to know the number of minutes and seconds that they have lived do not puzzle him in the least; almost instantaneously he gives the answer. That which appeared most to fatigue him was simple multiplication, rather a long sum, it is true. He was asked to multiply 78,965,428 by 56,789. | |||
“Not having these numbers before his eyes, and moreover, not being able to read, it was necessary to repeat them two or three times, until having remembered them, he could repeat them alone himself. A moment after, he dictated this exact and long product, 4,484,367,690,692, not however, without having thought (''cherche'') a little, with an evidently laborious effort, which proves that he is not aided by mediumship.” | |||
“Medium or not,” however, M. George continues, “Jacques Inodi is not the less one of the most convincing proofs of anterior acquirements.” “The phrenologists,” he adds, “will say that with so prominent a forehead, and with the bump of calculation so developed, all is explained.” But he thinks, also, that “they should not put forward as a ''cause'' that which is but an ''effect''.” | |||
Medium or no medium, Jacques Inodi could never demonstrate these problems, however acquired, unless he had a brain proportioned to his work, or what spirits call “a good tool to work with.” And probably no spirit could put this marvellous faculty into a brain in which the organ of calculation was deficient. | |||
There is, however, a very interesting letter in the ''Revue Spirite'', of May, which reveals a view of the question of mediumship or otherwise, doubly important because a solution of it proceeds from the boy himself. | |||
A M. Bouillac writes from Beze, near to Cette, and says that a young woman came into his house while Jacques was there, and the boy said to her, “Would you like me to tell you how many minutes have passed since you were born? Tell me your age; come now, let me know.” The young woman thus interrogated answered, “twenty two years.” “How many months and days?” the boy added, “Ah! you don’t know. Well now, in what year, what month and what day of the month were you born?” The young woman having answered, Jacques said, “That makes twenty two years, three months and seventeen days.” He then held down his head, and in twenty seconds he gave the number of minutes. I took a note and made the calculation; it was exact. I remarked that the child did not think or seek it, (''ne cherchait pas'') he was simply ''very attentive, he listened''. I said to him, “my little friend it is not you who make these calculations.” He looked me full in the face without answering. I repeated “I know it is not you,” and leaning towards him, and lowering my voice, I added, “I talk with the dead.” He looked at me, and answered with a satisfied air: “Do you talk with the dead? You! Very well; yes, sir, it is not I, it is my mother, who is dead that does all this for me, that I may get my bread,” &c. I asked him if he had told this to other people. He answered, “no,” and said that no one had asked him; and turning round he cried: (“''Tenez''.”) “There is my mother, there she is.” “Ask her,” I said, “if it pleases her to see you with us?” But the spirit was gone. This {{Style S-HPB SB. Continues on|10-355}} | |||
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