THE METHOD OP AGE GRADATION 65 



have had to have felt the greatest distrust of the 

 method. It would have raised the suspicion that we 

 were doing nothing more than testing the school at- 

 tainments themselves, either directly or indirectly, 

 in which event the method would be futile for test- 

 ing native endowment and its application would be 

 superfluous, for we would need only to resort to the 

 school performance directly for the information. " 



(e) Sex differences. Comparisons of the mental 

 abilities of boys and girls have already been carried 

 out in large numbers in experimental psychology, 

 but they have been almost entirely confined to single 

 tests, 18 whereas the Binet-Simon serial tests have 

 been used to but a surprisingly slight extent in 

 the comparison of the sexes and have not yet led to 

 positive conclusions. I confine myself to a brief ex- 

 position of the material in question. 



Goddard tested 835 boys and 712 girls. Unfortu- 

 nately, he has thrown together the data for the dif- 

 ferent ages: it follows that his figures (48, p. 250) 

 lose much of their value for comparative purposes, 

 because retardation and advance have quite differ- 

 ent meanings at different age-levels. Nevertheless, 

 we may reproduce here the table of distribution for 

 the children (which I have converted into percents). 



The tabular results suggest a slight inferiority of 

 the boys, most evident in the group of those retarded 



18 The literature has been brought together by me elsewhere 

 (1: Bibliography, Section VI) ; here we may cite the general sum- 

 maries of the results of tests by Meyer and Wreschner, and the ex- 

 tensive original studies of Cohn and Dieffenbacher (Nos. 1048, 

 1072 and 104 in the bibliography just cited). As one pretty gen- 

 erally confirmed result may be mentioned, among others, that with 

 the Ebbinghaus completion method girls are clearly inferior to 

 boys of the same age. 



