J.—PSYCHOLOGY 161 
and senescence will be at its maximum in the very young stages and the 
rate of senescence will diminish with age. 
On all these grounds it is not difficult to account for the ceaseless 
activity in child psychology. In fact, progress has been so great that 
some consider future possibilities to be strictly limited. Without accept- 
ing such a view it is nevertheless true, as Professor Walter Miles has 
pointed out, that although psychologists have exhibited great interest in 
the child and the adolescent yet there remain five or six decades of human 
life relatively untouched. 
At least four recent investigations merit our attention. They were 
initiated by Terman, Thorndike, Walter Miles, and Charlotte Bihler 
respectively. It is significant that each had already made outstanding 
contributions in child psychology, and each research was furthered by 
a grant, so that a band of experts were able to collaborate and produce 
results which would be quite unattainable by a single investigator who 
had to meet the charges out of his own pocket. 
In 1926 there appeared the second volume of Terman’s Genetic Studies 
of Genius. It is entitled The Early Mental Traits of Three Hundred 
Geniuses, and the investigations were carried out by Dr. Catherine M. Cox 
(now Mrs. Walter R. Miles) under the direction of Terman. Grants 
from the Commonwealth Fund of New York and the Thomas Welton 
Stanford Fund were available. It was concluded that youths who 
achieve eminence have, in general, a heredity above the average and 
superior advantages in early environment: they are characterised not 
only by high intellectual traits, but also by persistence of motive and 
effort, confidence in their abilities, and great strength or force of character. 
Thorndike’s Adult Learning appeared in 1928. His purpose was to 
study the changes in the amount and changes in the nature of ability to 
learn from about age fifteen to about age forty-five, and especially from 
age twenty-five to age forty-five. ‘The research was done with the aid of 
a grant from the Carnegie Corporation. Some of the conclusions may 
be briefly summarised : 
(1) The differences in rate of learning between old and young are small 
in comparison with the differences within either group, and when other 
factors than age are equalised the influence of age approaches zero. 
(2) Adults learn much less than they might partly because they under- 
estimate their power of learning, and partly because of unpleasant attention 
and comment. It is disuse and lack of practice and not inner degeneration 
which is likely to affect learning. 
(3) Ability to learn a systematic logical language, Esperanto, rises 
from 8 to 16 and probably to 20: it is then stationary to 25 or later and 
then drops very, very slowly to 35 and somewhat more rapidly, but still 
very slowly, to 45 or later. 
(4) The gain made in 50 or 100 or 500 hours of study of a modern 
language by a group of any age from 20 to 4o will be greater than the 
gain made by a group aged 8 or 10 or 12. The facts are in flat contradiction 
to the doctrine that childhood is the period for easiest learning to read, 
write, or understand the hearing of a language. 
(5) Learning representing an approximation to sheer modifiability 
G 
