lo MAL-NUTRITION AND THE TEACHER'S 



axes are markedly divergent from the means, as in the pre- 

 sent data, practically no reliance whatever can be placed on 

 the coefficient of association. It is, however, rather to the 

 value of the data used b}' Mr. Yule than to the methods 

 employed by him, that attention must be directed. 



Dr. Warner's investigation was based on 100,000 children 

 in all, and of these the first 50,000 were examined by 

 Dr. Warner himself within a period of three years. Giving 

 forty weeks to the year, five days a week, five hours a day, 

 which is all that is possible (but scarcely probable) in 

 school medical inspection, w^e find that Dr. Warner can 

 only have devoted on the average 3^ minutes to each child. 

 Yet the scJiedidc luhich Dr. Warner used contained over one 

 hundred groups of categories and several hundred categories 

 altogether} 



1 Dr. Warner's work, if very superficial and of little value in itself, was of 

 great service in directing attention to the question of ner\'ous symptoms in 

 children. Out of his work and the Report of the Commission on the Blind 

 and Deaf of some dozen years earlier came the movement for special schools, 

 liut this very fact of the creation of special schools has apparently been over- 

 looked by Mr. Yule, for their existence has removed the extreme mental 

 defectives from the L.C.C. survey, which I was considering. Dr. Warner 

 started v^'Wh the view that such mental defect was due to ill -nutrition, and his 

 estimate of mental defect was largely based on appearances also due to ill- 

 nutrition, and not unnaturally he found a high correlation. The ages of the 

 82 % of so-called ' normal ' children were not taken, and only the ages of the 

 abnormal children in the 1892-4 investigation were published. Thus the ages 

 of 8,941 children out of 50,000 are tabulated, but on this partial knowledge no 

 allowance can be made for growth changes, and except for his crude numbers 

 there is nothing which can be determined about his so-called * normal class '. 

 Dr. Warner's belief that mental defect can be removed by feeding and training 

 is not in accordance with the best current medical experience. If it were true 

 the special schools would be producing normal individuals, whereas the real 

 problem of feeble-mindedness turns on what to do with the defective children 

 when they leave the special schools. Again, if mere nutrition could develop 

 mentality, the heavy, overfed children who come into the schools from the 

 Poor Law system would not present such hopeless material for the teachers' 

 efforts as they do. There is, in fact, no real evidence that mental defect, pure 

 and simple, arises from ill-nutrition ; there is a condition of amentia— lowered 



