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life of the individual, to determine the mental and physical defects that 
produce delinquency and feeble-mindedness. 
Feeble-mindedness is a term used to describe individuals who have 
not attained a normal mental status when compared with individuals of 
the community. If their mental status is of such a character that they 
are not able to make the necessary adjustments in a complex social life 
they are deemed feeble-minded. This does not mean that there are no ad- 
justhents that they can make, but that they are able to react only to the 
simpler situations in life. Some feeble-minded children display remark- 
able alertness and acute sensitivity, and superficially one would not expect 
that there is any mental defect; but upon closer examination and study 
such an individual is found to be deficient in all matters that require 
complex associations and comparisons. By applying any one of the 
humerous scales for determining intelligence to such an individual, parts 
of the scales are answered with very great ease—namely, those parts that 
pertain to fineness of discrimination in sense impression, either visual or 
auditory. But when any part of the scale that requires reasoning, associa- 
tions, Comparisons, or complex mental processes is applied to her, she 
fails miserably. If a child is six years of age and only measures three 
years in intelligence there is some reason to expect feeble-mindedness. If 
a child is seven years of age and only measures three years, it becomes 
quite evident that development is so far retarded that the individual may 
be very well Classified as feeble-minded. Between the ages of seven and 
sixteen, if the mental age is found to be four years or more below the 
biological age, there is reason to expect that you are dealing with a feeble- 
minded person. This is an arbitrary standard that is fairly well adopted 
by psycho-clinicists in the United States. It is possible, however, to find 
individuals sixteen years of age who only measure twelve years of age 
psychologically whose mental retardation is due to disease or other causes 
than native weakness. Such individuals would form exceptions and should 
not be regarded as feeble-minded, for there would be a possibility of their 
very rapid development at a later period; but on the whole we are pretty 
safe in defining a feeble-minded individual as one whose mental develop- 
ment is as much as four or more years below the normal of a child of 
his age. 
Since having defined the feeble-minded girl, | shall endeavor to treat 
my topic from three different standpoints. First, how to discover her: 
second, what are her symptoms? and, third, what shall we do with her? 
