Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II THE SCIENTIFIC STUDY OF MENTAL DEFECTIVES What Reasons Have Educators and Society at Large /or Studying Subnormal Children? Let us reflect for a moment upon the significance of such children for the social life of their day, and for the future history of civilization. We have our distribution curve, representing, let us say, the intelligence of all adults at any given time. We have the average, the majority of mankind, working along and conserving the traditions of the race. They live with average ability and in average happiness. They present no special problem. They determine the normal life of their time by sheer force of numbers. They tend neither to degenerate, nor to advance markedly beyond traditions. At the extremely low end of our curve we have the undesirable and unfortunate deviates, the dull, the subnormal. They constitute a great burden, economically and socially. They tend to draw the whole mass of mankind downward. This influence works in a great variety of ways. By intermarriage with the more intelligent, the subnormals tend to degrade all the social body. By marrying or cohabiting among themselves they produce a numerous offspring, and increase the financial burden on public and private charity. Psychologists working in penal institutions and courts have shown conclusively that crime and delinquency of all kinds are closely related to mental subnormality. Alcoholism is closely bound up with mental deficiency, many feebleminded persons being chronic drunkards. Disease easily originates among the unintelligent, and is spread broadcast by them. The problem of the unmarried mother is to be understood more clearly in the light of mental inferiority. Since subnormal children grow up into subnormal adults, there is certainly sufficient reason here for...