James I of England ( 1566-1625) was surely among the first to propose a crosscultural study of psychological development. Long interested in the Bible, James sought to determine man's original language, that of Adam and Eve. To do so he conceived a unique experimental situation: James proposed to place two infants on an otherwise uninhabited island in the care of a deafmute nurse. Doubtlessly he reasoned that if the two spontaneously developed speech, theirs would be the "natural" language of man.