The Inchkeith Experiment

It was a wild gusty morning in Edinburgh and on the walk along Royal Terrace on my way to the Parliament I could see a very stormy Firth of Forth.

The island of Inchkeith was just visible about which I thought I recalled a very curious story which I later looked up. This is the Wikipedia version :

"During the reign of King James IV in the Renaissance, Inchkeith was the site of an extraordinary experiment. According to the historian Robert Lyndsay of Pitscottie, James IV directed in 1493 that a dumb Woman and two infants be transported to the island, in order to ascertain which language the infants would grow up to speak isolated from the rest of the world, thought to be the 'original' language, or language of the God(s). According to these accounts, the infants did not speak.

James Grant quotes Lyndsay on this topic.

He ordered them to take a mute woman and to put her in Inchkeith, to give her two children, and to provide her with everything she would need for their nourishment. His goal was to discover what language the children would speak when they were old enough to have "perfect" speech. Some say they spoke good Hebrew, but I do not know of any reliable sources for these claims. ( Robert Lyndsay of Pitscottie, James Grant's Edinburgh, Old and New).

I have always thought it was an awful thing to have done and the weather today just emphasised the point !