Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 84.djvu/83

Rh children. A rough classification into three groups, according to color—dark, medium, light—showed that the darkest children are more nearly normal, the lightest show the greatest variation, both above and below normal.

The limitations of the study are evident. It is but a crude beginning of a subject that will doubtless soon be opened up and made to yield interesting and profitable data. It need not be pointed out what radical changes would have to take place in our educational theory and practise, as well as in our social philosophy, if it should be shown conclusively that races differ in mental capacity and aptitude just as they do in physical appearance. No final conclusions, however, are here offered, nor is any attempt made to settle once and for all the question of race superiority or inferiority. That requires investigation along many lines hardly opened up as yet. But this much we' may surely conclude from the above study: that negro children from six to twelve and possibly fifteen years are mentally different, and also younger than southern white children of corresponding ages, and that this condition is partly due, at least, to causes that are native or racial. That is, if MM. Binet and Simon had originally tested southern negro children they would have worked out from the results a scale which would have been different from their present one in several respects, and which when applied to southern white children would be found to be, for the most part, a year or more too young, though possibly there would be some tests which would yield the opposite results.

Perhaps some day each branch of the human family will have a Binet scale of its own. Then, by a wholesale interchange of tests, as we do now with professors, it will be possible to determine wherein a given people are proficient and wherein deficient; and later, perhaps, by adding coefficients and credits to settle mooted questions of racial rank. But this again belongs to the realm of speculation.

Probably the point of greatest value brought out by this study is that perchance a key has been found in the Binet scale which will prove of the greatest service in the solution of problems in contemporary folk-psychology and race and social adjustments. Certain it is that these important human problems need the spirit, methods and instruments of science applied to them. The Binet scale is the first instrument that has appeared.