156 



SCIENCE. 



[N. S. Vol. IY. No. 84. 



tangibility. An occult impulse to vice is 

 hidden in all vagueness and in all teach- 

 ings meant to be heard, but not to be 

 understood. Nature is never obscure, 

 never occult, never esoteric. She must be 

 questioned in earnest, else she will not re- 

 ply. But to every serious question she re- 

 turns a serious answer. ' Simple, natural 

 and true' should make the impression of 

 simplicity and truth. Truth and virtue 

 are but opposite sides of the same shield. 

 As leaves pass over into flowers and flowers 

 into fruit, so are wisdom, virtue and happi- 

 ness inseparably related. 



David Stake Jokdan. 



OBSERVATIONS ON THE RELATION OF PHYS- 

 ICAL DEVELOPMENT TO INTELLECTUAL 

 ABILITY, 3IADE ON THE SCHOOL 

 CHILDREN OF TORONTO, CANADA. 



In the spring of 1892 Dr. Franz Boas, 

 then of Clark University, Worcester, Mass., 

 obtained the necessary permission from the 

 Toronto School Board to make anthropo- 

 metric observations upon the school chil- 

 dren of that city. The observations were 

 made by the teachers of the various schools 

 upon the children under their immediate 

 charge. The teachers were instructed as 

 to the method of taking the measurements 

 by Mr. A. F. Chamberlain of Clark Univer- 

 sity, and the subsequent work was carried 

 on under his immediate supervision. The 

 measurements made by the teachers were 

 stature, weight and finger reach. Besides 

 the statistical information regarding age, 

 sex, parentage, etc., the teachers were also 

 requested to group the children as to their 

 mental ability into three as nearly as possi- 

 ble equal divisions of 'good,' 'average' 

 and ' poor.' They were to make their esti- 

 mate, not on the mere class standing, which 

 would be influenced by such irrelevant mat- 

 ters as regularity and punctuality of at- 

 tendance, etc. , but upon the observed natural 

 intellectual quickness, general aptitude for 



assimilation of ideas and initiative. At the 

 same time that these observations were car- 

 ried on, a similar series of observations was 

 being made in Worcester. There it was 

 soon made manifest that any such classifica- 

 tion of children's mental ability would be 

 very greatly influenced by the mental cali- 

 bre of the teacher making such classifica- 

 tion, and in all cases it rested almost exclu- 

 sively upon the markings of the class book. 

 There was a further fact which was brought 



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very sharply to my notice, and that was 

 that in most class rooms there were no poor 

 scholars. The teachers were perfectly will- 



