44 A METHOD OF MEASURING THE DEVELOPMENT 



being allowed to look at them for ten seconds. The atten- 

 tion of the subject is prepared in advance; he is told that he 

 will be asked to reproduce the drawings from memory, and 

 that he will have but 10 seconds to look at them, and that 10 

 seconds is but a short time. It is difficult to estimate the 

 exactitude of the reproduction without taking a number of 

 measurements, which for our purpose would be unnecessarily 

 troublesome. We have adopted the following rule, which 

 is in practice quite convenient: The test is considered passed 

 when one of the designs is reproduced exactly, and half of 

 the other is correctly drawn ; the section of the prism is 

 always presented at the left; the subject's attention is usually 

 attracted first by this picture, and it is doubtless for this rea- 

 son that it is usually reproduced more correctly than the 

 other one. 



III. Criticises absurd phrases. — This is not the test of 

 which we first thought. Our aim was to test the judgment 

 of the child. For this purpose we employed a method used 

 by some foreign alienists; we made absurd statements in or- 

 der to see whether the child would assent to them. Here are 

 some examples of absurd phrases which we used at first: 

 "Why is there often a yellow dog when two men quarrel in 

 the street?" "Why is a master often decorated when he plays 

 billiards?" German alienists put questions of this kind to the 

 insane: "Is the snow red or black?" We have found by ex- 

 perience that if children of very limited intelligence accept 

 these absurdities, and try to find an answer for our strange 

 question, other children, very intelligent ones, are also taken 

 in by the trick. We have concluded that the acceptance of 

 an absurd statement by a child does not depend entirely upon 

 feebleness of judgment ; it depends largely upon timidity, def- 

 erence, confidence and automatism. We remember having 

 dictated our absurd phrases, together with others which were 

 not absurd, to a class of backward children at the Salpetriere. 

 Of course imbeciles and defectives were not lacking among 

 them; but there were about fifteen children who could answer 

 in writing. They formed a crowd, and the crowd is not timid 



