I9I2-] GODDARD— HEREDITY OF FEEBLE-MINDEDNESS. 175 



knows that among the pointers, there are those that are easily and 

 quickly trained to be high grade pointers ; there are other strains that 

 can never be trained to anything like the same efficiency. 



The same thing seems to be true of the human race. There are 

 strains that are capable of high mental development. These give us 

 our geniuses or our brilliant leaders, or families with marked and 

 valuable characteristics. Then there are strains with less capacity 

 but still able to get along in the world and adapt themselves to their 

 environment with fair success. These two groups are, of course, 

 normal people. But when we go a step lower, we find a group of 

 people whose capacity for development is so limited that they can 

 never attain sufficient intelligence to get along in the world. Here 

 we come to our group of feeble-minded and just as there are strains 

 of varying degrees of intelligence which we call normal, so there 

 are strains of varying degrees of defective intelligence, varying 

 from those that are almost normal, almost able to take care of them- 

 selves, down to those who are so lacking in intelligence that they 

 can do little more than procreate. 



We are, for the time being, eliminating entirely all disease and 

 abnormalities and fixing our attention upon what we call pure strains 

 of feeble-mindedness. Furthermore, when this strain of pure 

 feeble-mindedness is found uncomplicated as it often is, the mental 

 condition is the chief peculiarity and the physical organism is often- 

 times a remarkably perfect one, so that the strain is not recognized 

 by any of its outward appearances, but only by those actions and 

 movements which result from a less well-developed mentality. There 

 can be found in institutions for the feeble-minded, persons of as fine 

 physique and good health as can be found anywhere. This extends 

 often even to details. For example: a dentist asserts that the finest 

 set of teeth he has ever seen is in the mouth of an imbecile in an 

 institution for feeble-minded. 



Now it happens not unnaturally that these strains of defective 

 mentality are liable to diseases of various kinds just as are so- 

 called normal people. Whether the various diseases and accidents 

 affect them in the same way as they affect people of normal intelli- 

 gence, remains to be seen. It seems probable that in many cases the 



