Source: Futility Closet
In 1806 British scholar Benjamin Heath Malkin published A Father’s Memoirs of His Child to record the almost alarming gifts of his son Thomas, who had taught himself to read and write by age 2, inquired into mathematics and Latin, and at age 5 invented an imaginary country called Allestone:
Allestone … was so strongly impressed on his own mind, as to enable him to convey an intelligible and lively transcript of its description. Of this delightful territory he considered himself as king.
He had formed the project of writing its history,…