6 MAL-NUTRITION AND THE TEACHER'S 



in view I held and still hold that the estimates of intelli- 

 gence made by the teachers were of value and could be 

 used for the study of the influence of environment on 

 intelligence. 



It was pointed out in the memoir that the position of the 

 child in the standard, corrected for age, might well be used 

 as a measure of general intelligence. This meets with 

 Mr. Yule's approval, and he says that ' it is not clear why it 

 was not adopted in the present memoir '. But had it been 

 given it certainly would have been used, if not directly,^ 

 certainly as a check on the estimates made by the teachers, 

 since the amount of correlation between place in standard 

 and the teacher's estimate of intelligence furnishes a perfectly 

 reliable test of the value of the latter, and it is for this 

 purpose that a knowledge of place in class is of most value. 



Now we cannot apply this test in the case of the L.C.C. 

 data, but we can appeal to other data, collected under 

 much the same conditions. Under the auspices of the 

 Royal Commission on Physical Training in Scotland 

 (1902), Professor Matthew Hay carried out an examination 

 of a number of Aberdeen school children. Professor Hay 

 kindly placed these returns at the disposal of the Galton 

 Laboratory, and they are discussed by Professor Pearson 

 and Miss Jones in a recent number of Biometrika} The 

 material consisted of an examination of 249 boys taken 

 from four Aberdeen schools. For each boy there was given 

 an estimate of mental capacity by the class teacher who 

 had not volunteered for the work, nor was he specially 

 selected. 



The scale of intelligence used was again somewhat vague. 

 The children were divided into four classes : excellent, 

 good, moderate, and dull. It should be noted that the 



^ Biomeirika, vol. vii, part 4, p. 542. 



