By the Binet Scale this girl showed, in April, 1910, the mentality of a nine-year-old child with two points over; January, 1911, 9 years, 1 point; September, 1911, 9 years, 2 points; October, 1911, 9 years, 3 points. She answers correctly all of the questions up to age 7 except the repetition of five figures, where she transposes two of them. She does not read the selection in the required time, nor does she remember what she reads. In counting the stamps, her first answer was “ten cents,” which she later corrected. Under age 9, none of her definitions are “better than by use”—“Fork is to eat with,” “Chair to sit on,” etc. She can sometimes arrange the weights in their proper order and at other times not. The same is true of putting the three words into a sentence. She does not know money. Her definitions of abstract terms are very poor, in some cases barely passable, nor can she put together the dissected sentences. She rhymes “storm” with “spring,” and “milk” with “mill,” afterwards using “bill,” “will,” “till.”
In the revised questions, she does not draw the design which is Question 2 in age 10, nor does she resist suggestion, Question 4 in age 12. To the first part of Question 5, age 12, she answered, “A bird hanging from the limb,” and to the second part, “Some one was very sick.”
This is a typical illustration of the mentality of a high-grade feeble-minded person, the moron, the delinquent, the kind of girl or woman that fills our reformatories. They are wayward, they get into all sorts of trouble and difficulties, sexually and otherwise, and yet we have been accustomed to account for their defects on the basis of viciousness, environment, or ignorance.
It is also the history of the same type of girl in the public school. Rather good-looking, bright in appearance, with many attractive ways, the teacher clings to the hope, indeed insists, that such a girl will come out all right. Our work with Deborah convinces us that such hopes are delusions.
Here is a child who has been most carefully guarded. She has been persistently trained since she was eight years old, and yet nothing has been accomplished in the direction of higher intelligence or general education. To-day if this young woman were to leave the Institution, she would at once become a prey to the designs of evil men or evil women and would lead a life that would be vicious, immoral, and criminal, though because of her mentality she herself would not be responsible. There is nothing that she might not be led into, because she has no power of control, and all her instincts and appetites are in the direction that would lead to vice.
We may now repeat the ever insistent question, and this time we indeed have good hope of answering it. The question is, “How do we account for this kind of individual?” The answer is in a word “Heredity,”—bad stock. We must recognize that the human family shows varying stocks or strains that are as marked and that breed as true as anything in plant or animal life.
Formerly such a statement would have been a guess, an hypothesis. We submit in the following pages what seems to us conclusive evidence of its truth.