Real Dullards are Scarce 253 



that he might be made to do fairly well in several of 

 them; and that he might become an expert in at 

 least one of them. 



So, there is little need of being worried over the 

 thought that the boy is a natural-born dullard, 

 without native ability to learn and finally to make his 

 way in the world. It is true that there is occasion- 

 ally a real "blockhead" among children, but such 

 cases are quite as rare as imbecility and physical 

 deformity. Indeed, such cases are nearly always 

 connected with one or both of the defects just named. 

 Then, while in the usual instance the child is to be 

 assumed to possess an ample amount of native 

 talent, one of the specific problems of his parents and 

 teachers is that of learning in time what his best 

 latent talent is, so that it may give proper incentive 

 and direction for his vocational life. 



CLASSES OF NATIVE ABILITY 



Roughly speaking there are three classes of native 

 ability in the jhuman offspring: the super-normal, 

 the normal, and the sub-normal. The first is con- 

 stituted of the geniuses few and far between, 

 perhaps one in a hundred to five hundred. The sec- 

 ond is composed of the great mass of humanity upon 

 which the stability of the race is built and out of 

 which the geniuses and the majority of the sub- 

 normals spring through fortuitous variation. The 

 third class is constituted of the feeble-minded, the 



