Apbil 10, 1914] 



SCIENCE 



547 



nothing left for the psychologist as his proper 

 field? M.y answer is that it is the psychologist's 

 business to make comprehensible that link which 

 is interposed between our sensory surfaces and 

 our muscles, the function of the nervous system. 

 Apparently, this demand is supplied by a scien- 

 tist who, again, is not the psychologist — by the 

 physiologist. As a matter of fact, however, a 

 text-book on the physiology of the nervous sys- 

 tem, even such as Sherrington 's or Loeb 's, would 

 not suit the needs of a college class in psychology. 

 I should say, therefore, that the psychologist's 

 task consists in making comprehensible the func- 

 tion of the nervous system as the chief deter- 

 miner of all those varied forms of human behavior 

 which we find described in a good novel, in the 

 drama, in biography, in history, in the newspaper. 

 In order to illustrate this task, a number of typi- 

 cal problems were discussed and solutions pro- 



CMldren with Mental Defects Distinguished from 

 Mentally Defective Children: Lightner Witmer. 

 ' ' Were society so organized that success in life 

 in every sphere of activity were dependent upon 

 a good enough ear to turn a tune, many persons 

 who are now doing useful work in the world would 

 have to be relegated to the class of imbeciles." 

 Several cases were reported, among them the case 

 of a boy who at fourteen years, although he was 

 normal in appearance and behavior and had been 

 attending school regularly, was at the educational 

 stage of a child of seven. He was unable to read 

 for himself, for pleasure or profit, and his spell- 

 ing was as deficient as his reading. When he 

 wrote a letter it was impossible to make out his 

 meaning without knowing what he had intended 

 to say. Careful examination showed that the boy 

 was suffering from a language defect, psycholog- 

 ically a defect of memory. There was both a 

 weakness in retaining new impressions and a 

 weakness in the recall of impressions which had 

 been received and partially retained. He was 

 word deaf as well as word blind, or, to put it 

 scientifically, he was a case of congenital aphasia. 

 ' ' Congential aphasia is a more serious defect to 

 the individual than the lack of an ear for music, 

 because of the social and industrial importance 

 of speech; perhaps also because a certain measure 

 of language development is essential for accurate 

 thinking. ... I regard the child, for that matter 

 the adult also, as composed of a number of traits, 

 some of them assets if they favor normal mental 

 development and success in adult life; some of 

 them defects if they provoke retardation, arrested 



development, delinquency and crime. There is no 

 so-called normal person who does not possess some 

 defects along with his assets. The type of child 

 in whom I am especially interested and for whom 

 I organized and am directing the work of the 

 psychological clinic at the University of Pennsyl- 

 vania, is the child who has so many and such 

 severe mental defects as seriously to interfere with 

 normal development in the home and in the school 

 and to prognosticate his arrival at adult age ar- 

 rested in mental and moral development. Because 

 a child has one or a few mental defects, we must 

 not characterize him as mentally defective. . . . 

 A strictly scientific nomenclature will dispense 

 with the term 'mentally defective,' as failing to 

 characterize with sufficient definiteness the class 

 of children under consideration. What character- 

 izes 'mentally defective' children is not that they 

 are mentally defective, for other children, in fact 

 all children, are mentally defective, but that they 

 are so defective mentally as to be socially unfit. 

 For the term 'mentally defective' I would there- 

 fore propose substituting the term ' socially unfit ' 

 or ' socially defective. ' ' ' 



Published in The Psychological Clinic, Vol. 

 VII., No. 7, December 15, 1913. 

 Some Fundamental Concepts in Social Psychology : 



L. E. Geissler. (By title.) 

 Correlation of Mental and Physical Measurement : 



Jasper C. Barnes. 



The correlations described iu this paper are 

 based upon the physical measurements of one 

 hundred students, members of the psychology 

 class in Maryville College, during the year of 

 1912-13 and the fall term of 1913. The list in- 

 cludes fifty young men and fifty young women 

 representing all of the four college classes and 

 twenty different states. The average age of the 

 young men was 21.7 years, while the average age 

 of the young ladies was 21.3 years. The youngest 

 in each case was 17. The oldest young man was 

 26, and of the young ladies 31. The mental meas- 

 urements are in terms of grades received by the 

 students in their various studies, and hence are 

 not mental measurements in the laboratory sense 

 at all. The physical measurements were five: 

 height, weight, vital capacity, length and width 

 of head. The apparatus used was the stadiometer, 

 anthropometric scales, wet-spirometer and head 

 calipers. 



According to the method of group comparison 

 there seems to be very little relation between 

 height and scholarship, or weight and scholarship. 

 But between the vital capacity and mental abil- 



