The Editor: Feeblemindedness 



33 



Fortvmately, however, not all feeble- 

 mindedness is due to heredity. Just 

 how much is due to other causes, no one 

 can say : Goddard thinks that one-third 

 of the cases examined in his work at 

 Vineland may be ascribed to some other 

 cause than inheritance. These appear 

 to be due in some cases to a neuropathic 

 ancestry, in others to accident before, 

 at, or after birth, in others to some 

 disease such as scarlet fever or spinal 

 meningitis, during childhood. Cases of 

 such origin are not transmitted to 

 offspring, and therefore are of little 

 importance to the genetist. By no 

 means all cases where accidents are 

 blamed for feeblemindedness are really 

 due to that cause, it appears, further 

 investigation showing enough feeble- 

 mindedness in the ancestry fully to 

 account for the child's condition; on 

 the other hand, the fact that a certain 

 child is left feebleminded by an attack of 

 disease, while a dozen others who have 

 it at the same time escape unscathed, 

 indicates that here too a weakness of 

 some sort in the family stock may 

 explain the resulting arrest of mental 

 development in the particular case. 



There are a number of supposed- 

 causes of feeblemindedness which God- 

 dard finds to have little reality, as far 

 as his own experience goes. Thus there 

 seems reason to doubt that parents' 

 alcoholism arrests the child's mental 

 development to the extent of leaving 

 it among the feebleminded. Paralysis, 

 epilepsy, insanity or syphilis in the 

 parents seem of themselves insufficient 

 to account for a child's feebleminded- 

 ness ; neither can tuberculosis or consan- 

 guineous marriage explain such a result. 

 Where these things occur, they occur 

 not as causes, but as corrollaries or 

 effects, of a defective germ-plasm. 



THE "criminal TYPE " 



On the other hand, feeblemindedness 

 itself is at the bottom of an amount of 

 social abnormaUty which the ordinary 

 sociologist — much less the layman — 

 rarely realizes. The so-called "criminal 

 type," Goddard beUeves, is merely a 

 type of feeblemindedness, a type mis- 

 understood and mistreated, driven into 



criminality for which he is well fitted by 

 nattire. The chronic alcoholic is often 

 to be explained by an arrest of mental 

 development, rather than by original 

 sin or moral perversity. The prostitute, 

 in from one-fourth to two-thirds of the 

 cases investigated in different cities, is 

 found to be feebleminded, and should be 

 hiunanely segregated rather than pun- 

 ished or "reformed." The ne'er-do- 

 wells of a community are usually found, 

 if adequately tested, to be morons; the 

 adult vagrant and the confirmed child 

 truant usually belong to the same type. 

 The expensive "special classes" of the 

 public schools are filled with children 

 a large part of whom are morons; an 

 attempt is made to educate them, when 

 an examination of their ancestry would 

 show that it is humanly impossible to 

 educate them, in the way that their 

 playmates are educated. In fact, such 

 tests as those of Binet, wherever 

 applied, have rarely failed to show that 

 the number of social problems whose 

 solution lies with genetics rather than 

 with ordinary sociology is far greater 

 than anyone except the eugenist realizes. 



Unfortunately, the exact role of 

 heredity in any given case can only be 

 found by an investigation of the ];edi- 

 gree — a labor that involves much expense 

 and timie as well as the indispensable aid 

 of a skilled field worker. Nay, the 

 very presence of feeblemindedness is 

 often ignored, and an individual blamed 

 for perversity, incompetence or stupid- 

 ity, when the examination of a trained 

 psychologist would show a discrepancy 

 between mental age and physical age. 

 The lower grades, the idiots and im- 

 beciles, can indeed be distinguished by 

 almost anyone, but the moron, partic- 

 ularly of the higher grade, is detected 

 only by the careful observation of a 

 competent investigator equipped with 

 psychological tests and experience in 

 using them. And even there, one finds 

 a border line where one can not with 

 confidence say whether the subject is 

 normal or abnormal — these words being 

 merely relative terms without exact 

 definition. 



"The feebleminded in bulk — if we 

 exclude special types of idiots — ^are not 



