Of all the different explanations, then, which have been given, that of Feuerbach seems to be the most satisfactory.  At the same time, like the rest, it is founded on conjecture.  Its truth may never be proved.  They whose interest it was to suppress the matter thirty years ago, and who resorted to such extreme measures in doing so, no doubt took ample precaution that every trace should be erased.  It is barely possible that some confession or the discovery of some paper may cast light upon the subject; but the length of time which has elapsed renders it exceedingly improbable, and the mystery of Caspar Hauser, like the mysteries of the Iron Mask and Junius, will always remain a fruitful source of conjecture only.

It may not be uninteresting to close this sketch with the consideration of a point of law raised by Feuerbach in connection with the subject.  It will be recollected that he calls his book “Caspar Hauser.  An Example of a Crime against the Life of Man’s Soul.”  The crime committed against Caspar Hauser was, according to the Bavarian code, twofold.  There was the crime of illegal imprisonment, and the crime of exposure.  And here Feuerbach advances the doctrine, that it was not only the actual confinement which amounted to illegal imprisonment, but that “we must incontestably, and, indeed, principally, regard as such the cruel withholding from him of the most ordinary gifts which Nature with a liberal hand extends even to the most indigent,—­the depriving him of all the means of mental development and culture,—­the unnatural detention of a human soul in a state of irrational animality.”  “An attempt,” he says, “by artificial contrivances, to seclude a man from Nature and from all intercourse with rational beings, to change the course of his human destiny, and to withdraw from him all the nourishment afforded by those spiritual substances which Nature has appointed for food to the human mind, that it may grow and flourish, and be instructed and developed and formed,—­such an attempt must, even quite independently of its actual consequences, be considered as, in itself, a highly criminal invasion of man’s most sacred and most peculiar property,—­of the freedom and the destiny of his soul. ...Inasmuch as the whole earlier part of his life was thus taken from him, he may be said to have been the subject of a partial soul-murder.”  This crime, if recognized, would, according to Feuerbach, far outweigh the mere crime of illegal imprisonment, and the latter would be merged in it.

Tittmann, in his “Hand-Book of Penal Law,” also speaks of crimes against the intellect, and particularly mentions the separation of a person from all human society, if practised upon a child before it has learned to speak and until the intellect Las become sealed up, as well as the intentional rearing of a person to ignorance, as reducible to this head.  This was written before Caspar’s case had occurred.  He says, also, that they are similar to cases of homicide;