the most satisfactory point.
In practice of course, students of retardation test children by standardized scales. Testing a hundred 10-year-old children, the examiner might find a number who were able to do only those tests which are passed by a normal six-year-old child. He might properly decide to put all who thus showed four years of retardation, in the class of feeble-minded; and he might justifiably decide that those who tested seven years (i.e., three years mental retardation) or less would, for the present, be given the benefit of the doubt, and classed among the possibly normal. Such a procedure, in dealing with intelligence, is necessary and justifiable, but its adoption must not blind students, as it often does, to the fact that the distinction made is an arbitrary one, and that there is no more a hard and fast line of demarcation between imbeciles and normals than there is between "rich men" and "poor men."