230 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES. 
8. Specific Abilities. 
With individual differences in general intelligence I have dealt at 
disproportionate length, partly because intelligence is, in Galton’s 
phrase, a human quality of the utmost ‘ civic worth,’ and partly because 
it is the one mental capacity upon which a prolonged and concentrated 
study has been focussed. 
Over specific inborn abilities I need not linger. For them effective 
tests have proved disconcertingly hard to contrive. Simple correlation 
is here inapplicable. General intelligence is always getting in our way. 
We think we have tested something specific. We find we have only 
hit upon another test of intelligence. Its ubiquitous influence can only 
be eliminated by some elaborate technical device, the procedure, fer 
example, known as multiple correlation; and the complexity of the 
whole task bewilders even where it does not baffle. 
Nor do these special abilities, although presumably inborn, declare 
themselves at so young an age as the more general. Specialisation 
during the first twelve years of childhood is the exception rather than 
the rule. ‘ Young turtle,’ says Epicurus, ‘is every kind of meat in 
one—fish, fowl, pork, and venison; but old turtle is just plain turtle.’ 
Similarly, the young child contains in fresh and dormant essence the 
germ of every faculty. Age alone betrays our idiosyncrasies. 
Adolescence is pre-eminently the period when many of these localised 
talents and specialised interests seem for the first time to mature. 
Accordingly, efforts at vocational guidance and educational specialisation 
must not be forced at too early a stage. At present, for example, the 
system of junior county scholarships tends to sweep all our brightest 
children at the age of ten or eleven into secondary schools of a some- 
what academic type. When at a later period examinations are held for 
trade schools, most of the best instances of special talent are missing: 
they have already been creamed off and drafted into other directions less 
suited to their powers. 
So far as it has been successful, the results of multiple correlation, 
eked out by other scattered indications, point to the following abilities 
as depending upon factors relatively specific: arithmetical, manual 
(drawing, writing, probably handwork of simpler kinds), verbal (reading 
and spelling), literary (composition in one’s own tongue), linguistic 
(learning foreign languages), artistic, and musical, the last often appear- 
ing at an unusually early age. Of such specific or ‘ group’ factors 
the specificity is not complete. There is much overlap; and, with every 
one of them, it is extremely hard to frame tests which depend mainly 
for success neither upon the ‘ central factor ’ of general intelligence, nor 
yet upon some particular capacity, so limited and local that no inference 
can be made from one performance to another, even within the same 
presumable group. 
The abilities just enumerated seem undoubtedly specialised. But 
how far are they inborn? In practice what is actually tested must turn 
largely upon acquired dexterity, knowledge, and interest. And acquire- 
ments (as the classical experiments on formal training have taught us) 
tend always to be circumscribed; they do not diffuse or spread. The 
