Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 83.djvu/334

330 the fact that no definite standards are available by which each immigrant may be judged as to his mental development and normality. Mental defectiveness or backwardness in the Pole or Russian expresses itself in a very different manner from the same conditions in a West Indian negro or in a Basque, or an Italian. Each is accustomed to a more or less limited and different range of experience. Each has a distinctive hereditary endowment and has grown up with a distinctive training, a peculiar environment and habit of thought and action. Experience and deduction agree that each must be examined by methods peculiarly suited to his own circumstances. Such methods can only be developed from the experience of trained men in the careful examination of many cases. Numerous cases are put through a detailed mental examination and released because no definite and recognizable sign of mental impairment could be obtained. Many have latent symptoms which are indefinite, but which if kept on record for a large number of cases would make possible a more exact standard of diagnosis. If a careful stenographic record were filed