SECTIONAL TRANSACTIONS.— J. 609 



and reading essentials be sufficiently overcome to permit the free play of the child's 

 intelligence on the problem in hand, and thus only after these ages can the tests be 

 used as sound diagnostic teclmique. It is not so much advanced that these difficulties 

 have been newly discovered, as practice — and rehearsal — testing have already been 

 introduced, but that the analysis has shown the exact limits of soundness, and the 

 exact nature and magnitude of the difficulty that does exist at early stages of testing. 



Mr. E. Farmer.— TAe Intercorrelations of Psychological Tests, with Special 

 reference to Group Factors. 



Joint Discussion with Section F {q.v.) ou The Present Position of Skill in 

 Industry. 



Afternoon. 



Dr. S. DAWSON.^DwZ^wess and Disease. 



It seems to be fairly well established that the intelUgence-ratios of children as 

 measured by modem schemes of tests normally remain approximately constant, at 

 any rate, until adolescence, but we still know very little about the effects of specific 

 conditions on this ratio. An enquiry into the intelligence of sick children, which was 

 begun by the late Dr. H. J. Watt, of the Psychological Laboratory of the University 

 of Glasgow, and has been going on for the last six years, has thrown some light on this 

 question. By comparing the average intelligence-ratios of groups of children 

 suffering from various ailments (1) with those of their brothers and sisters, and (2) with 

 those of the same patients either after recovery or at a later stage in their illness, it has 

 been found that most ailments have little or no appreciable effect on intelligence, but 

 that some, e.g. encephalitis lethargica and epilepsy, not only are associated with 

 mental subnormahty, but actually produce it. 



Dr. R. D. Gillespie. — Relation of Size of Family to Psycho-neuroses. 



It has been shown by Havelock Ellis in his ' Genetic Study oi British Genius,' that 

 the eldest and the youngest members of a family are more apt than the intermediate 

 members to be intellectually distinguished ; on the other hand, pronounced mental 

 defect, i.e. imbecility and idiocy, also affects the eldest (Still) and the youngest (Sir 

 A. Mitchell) more frequently. Similarly, a group of psychoneurotics (persons suffering 

 from ' functional mental disorders ') has been found to be composed of a dispro- 

 portionately large number of eldest and youngest members of families, after correction 

 tor discrepancies in the numbers falling into each position in the family. Only 

 children -vfere not exceptionally numerous among them, contrary to the general belief, 

 being only 5 per cent, of the group. This coincides with the result of Stuart's investiga- 

 tion into the temperament and character of only children among college students. 

 The psychoneurotic persons in question frequently came from unusually large families, 

 and the average size of family from which they sprang was five ; while individuals 

 of the group who had married and had reached the age of forty, had families of an 

 average size of only 1"6. The latter figure is about the average size of family in the 

 upper and middle classes of the population as a whole at the present day, for marriages 

 which have existed for ten years ; which suggests that psychoneurotic persons as a 

 class are tending to infertility, but not to an extent greater than the general population 

 of the same social strata. 



The data given for psychoneurotics refer to surviving children only. For this and 

 other reasons the effects of place in family in producing psychoneuroses are presumably 

 psychological. It has been suggested that the predominance of eldest children among 

 psychoneurotics depends on the largely experimental nature of their upbringing by 

 inexperienced parents ; but this seems to be contradicted by the comparative 

 infrequency of only children among ' nervous ' adults. It is more likely that the 

 specially favoured positions of eldest and youngest are fraught with danger from their 

 psychological relation to the other members. 



Dr. D. N. Buchanan. — Hypnotism. 



1928 R R 



