694 COMPARATIVE AND GENETIC PSYCHOLOGY 



chief attention. By the happy choice of that committee we shall 

 be addressed upon a subject suggested by the first of these topics 

 by Principal C. Lloyd Morgan of University College, Bristol, the 

 psychologist of the animal mind for all of English tongue. On the 

 other topic we shall listen to Professor Mary Whiton Calkins of 

 Wellesley College, whose demonstrated balance of judgment and 

 critical insight amply justify her selection to outline present pro- 

 blems, while in her own person she represents for us the source 

 from which in the end we shall probably get our fullest and most 

 reliable data of human psychogenesis, the sympathetic and yet 

 scientifically faithful observations of sisters, aunts, and mothers. 

 In those also who have consented to make the briefer addresses 

 of the occasion we have those who will speak with authority upon 

 the matters with which they deal. 



" I wish very briefly to point out the importance, as it seems to 

 me, of still another plot within, or closely adjacent to, our general 

 field, which ought well to repay cultivation. 1 refer to the study of 

 the mentally deficient not at all from a pathological point of view, 

 but from that of comparative and genetic psychology. 



" Philanthropy has been interested in such cases now for many 

 years, and an enormous literature has accumulated with regard 

 to the practical questions of their housing, feeding, care, and edu- 

 cation, and upon the medical, anatomical, and etiological aspects 

 of them as medical cases, but only here and there has an investi- 

 gator tried to gather something definite with regard to their psych- 

 ical condition; and in doing so very few have made use of any- 

 thing like systematic observation or experimentation. There has, 

 no doubt, been abundant reason for this, but the time has come, 

 I believe, when something more may be undertaken with advan- 

 tage alike to the special department of applied knowledge upon 

 which their care and treatment rests and to psychology in gen- 

 eral. 



" Where in the world can we expect to find a better control for 

 the stages of human development as we have worked them out 

 in normal human children than in these infinitely graded cases of 

 arrest, even if the arrest is not by any means a simple persistent 

 status quo ? The normal child is fluid, exposed to, and deflected 

 by, a thousand incalculable influences, whereas the defective child 

 is by his very defect put into simpler and more permanent and 

 more calculable relations. Most mothers would surely resent an 

 argument that sought to prove that their babies are now idiotic, 

 because they would inevitably turn out to be idiots if they should 

 halt in their course of daily development; and the mothers would 

 be right; but there is enough resemblance between the conditions 

 to make cross-reference illuminating. 



