A NEW EDUCATIONAL EXPERIMENT. 1109 
This incapacity is due—either to some defect inherent in the 
child at birth—a defect inherited from drunken or idiotic parents 
—or to some illness or neglected accident which arrested develop- 
ment during childhood up to the seventh year. Dr. Francis 
Warner has estimated that one in every thousand of the London 
population suffers from such an incapacity ; and a recent examina- 
tion of the pupils in the London School Board has shown that 
1 per cent. of these children are really intellectually incapable of 
doing the ordinary work of the school. 
Although these special schools are a distinctive feature of the 
German educational system, they owe their foundation to a young 
Swiss doctor of the name of Guggenbihl. By his observations 
of the Crétins, who he found could commit to memory long 
prayers and psalms, he conceived the idea that further training 
would be possible for them. He entered at once into communica- 
tion with the leading Swiss teachers, some of whom were pupils 
of Pestalozzi, and with them he consecrated his life to the training 
of defective children. The first school was opened by him at 
Interlaken in 1839 ; and a school on the same plan was opened at 
Hubertsburg, in Saxony, that kingdom being always, since the 
time of Luther, to the forefront in matters educational. There 
are now about sixty of these schools in Germany, and their numbers 
are increasing through the general appreciation of their work. 
In Berlin, alone, there is no such school, as the Inspector of 
Schools in that town denies the necessity for its existence, asserting 
that the idiot asylums and the elementary and secondary schools 
supply the needs of the population. 
The first institution for the education of defective children in 
Germany was a Government venture, and since that time the new 
institutions are supported either by the Government or the 
municipality. 
The test for admission to these schools is this: If a child remain 
for two years in one class in any school without showing sufficient 
intellectual capacity to pass into the higher class, he is examined 
first by the director of the school and then by a medical man ; 
neither examination alone is suflicient: the director is apt to 
mistake laziness for incapacity, and the doctor is inclined to think 
physical health implies mental capacity. 
Tf the child prove to be really deficient, the parents are advised— 
although, of course, they cannot be compelled—to send him to a 
Hilfs-schule, as moral as well as intellectual deterioration will be 
the inevitable result of his continuing in the ordinary school, where 
he daily learns to realise more and more vividly the helplessness 
of the competition with his schoolmates, and depths of his own 
inferiority. At first the parents protested loudly against the 
assertion that their children were intellectually incapable, and 
