1913-14.] Analytical Study of the Mechanism of Writing. 231 
validity. Worst o£ all is the antagonism between the two groups of 
workers in the same field, which is all the more dangerous because the one 
group is mainly composed of psychologists, who know little of the practical 
work of education, and rather look down upon the practical teacher, and 
the other group of practical teachers, who have merely a superficial 
acquaintance with laboratory psychology, and distrust the psychologist. 
This condition of unstable equilibrium, if it can be so described, has 
characterised the early stages in the development of other experimental 
sciences in the past, notably of experimental psychology itself. The con- 
dition will pass, but only when the new science comes to its own in a 
developed laboratory equipment, and a developed technique, which are 
peculiar to itself and not merely borrowed from another science. It is 
obvious that experimental pedagogy must always owe a considerable debt 
to experimental psychology, and also that a great deal of good work may 
be done with the simplest apparatus. But there are certain fundamental 
problems of the school, and of life from the school point of view, all 
analytic problems demanding accurate analytical methods, which must be 
entirely ignored or only superficially noticed, if we confine ourselves to 
either or both of these lines of approach. It would seem, therefore, that 
some of the most interesting, and, if not the most important and practically 
valuable, at any rate most significant work in the new field is that which 
undertakes the analytical study, under laboratory conditions and by means 
of laboratory apparatus, of complex processes characteristic of the work of 
the school, from the teacher’s rather than the psychologist’s point of view. 
Such complex processes as reading, writing, and reckoning, either as 
acquired ££ dexterities ” or in the acquiring, may be cited as illustrating the 
field for analytical investigation offered by the school. To the extent that 
such processes are fundamental in school work, their investigation should 
logically occupy a central position in the new experimental science. Con- 
siderable progress has already been made, chiefly in Germany and America, 
in the analytical study of the reading process. The main purpose of the 
present paper is to indicate how a similar study may be made of the 
writing process. This purpose will be best achieved by describing some 
pieces of apparatus which have been devised with a view to the analysis of 
various elements in the mechanism of writing; for the analysis of the 
various factors involved in writing is obviously the first step towards its 
scientific study. The three pieces of apparatus described are all intended 
to isolate elements in the manual mechanism, and they all yield graphic 
records which may be examined at our leisure and compared with the 
actual writing itself. 
