A striking idea in Ted Ching’s essay about the 1911 nol ‘The Hampdenshire Wonder’ depicting te birth, childhood and fotunes ofa superintelligen tboy he wite that,
“In the future ‘intelligence’ may be regarded as a historical curiosity, like phlogiston, but until we develop a more precise vocabulary, we continue to use the term. Our contemporary notion of intelligence first gained currency around the time that Beresford was writing, and one can see how that converged with the idea of the superhuman in The Hampdenshire Wonder.”