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The enthusiasm of Itard in 1800 to reclaim the wild boy of Aveyron, which inspired the efforts of his pupil Seguin in his wonderful work at the Bicetré, was a noble preparation, but still, as Seguin himself admits, was only experimental until "Haller, Boerhaave and Morgagni had brought physiology to its rightful place at the head of the medical sciences," and Rosseau and Pereire and others had demonstrated its applica-tion to education. Then the closing decade of our first half century witnessed a simultaneous movement in England, America, and on the Continent in the establishment of institu-tions for the training of mental defectives. The work was good of its kind, and we have not improved upon it, nor can we, for it was expended chiefly upon the class which, as I have told you, is largely unimprovable. It was, and is, embarrassed greatly to-day by the idea eagerly embraced by the ignorant of cure. I wish it were only possible to convince some of the heart broken mothers that for congenital mental weakness there is no cure. One may as well talk of curing a child born without an arm as restoring a defective brain. We cannot replace that which never was placed.

In this new era now opening before us, science again points the way, and having before dictated new principles as bases of practice, she now designates new cases to he treated. Med-ical science in all its branches, educators from kindergarten to university, have, during the last half century, studied man. Viewing this investigation, culminating as it has in this wave of child study, one might say that anthropology and sociology had led all in one common bond to the cradle, to note there the influences of fateful heredity and of a nervous environment.

This simultaneous investigation and comparison of views has caused rapid modification of thought, judgment, and con-sequent action, already materially affecting individuals and so-ciety. In law, in medicine, in education we find signs of less dogmatism and severe condemnation, more time given to ob-servation, and greater desire to assist rather than to force na-ture. As criminology begins to show the criminal the irre-sponsible victim of ill rather than its deliberate author, and as alienists and neurologists constantly note and report new ex-amples of nerve disorder, society begins to recoil from the evils of imprudent marriage connection, and from a high-pressure system of life and education, falsely so called, and so the signs of the times are full of hope -- hope which shows endless possi-bilities for teachers and guardians -- of a dominant and domi-nating race. It means success and victory all along educa-tional lines if untrammeled by defectives, but defeat which will lead to tedious and endless readjustments if teachers are forced to continue the impossible task of dragging normal and abnormal up to one common standard.

Let us meet the crisis, recognizing it as a national one, and win as our nation has won before. One hundred thousand of the feeble-minded in the United States alone, constantly in-creasing by birth and immigration, and not one-tenth provided for in institutions. The rest crowd our schools, walk our streets, and fill alike jails and positions of trust, reproducing their kind and vitiating the moral atmosphere.

Science and experience have searched them out and classi-fied them as here presented, but hundreds of their brethren are desolating homes, paralyzing the energies of normal peo-ple, or suffer in prison cells, the innocent perpetrators, not of crime, but of motiveless acts.

To nations and races as to households and individuals must come a clearing-out time, and it has come to us. There must be a sifting out, and "each must go to his own place" if we are to clear the way for twentieth century progress, and therein lies the wherefore of our work. We are already preparing to receive the element which the backward classes of feebly gifted children and the truant schools will eventually bring to us, and we are doing it by means not of mere trade schools -- that will come later -- but of an all-round system of development through manual training. We must take what the schools sift out, but in order to do this, we too must have our clearing, for we shall need space, and yet more space. With our untrainable popu-lation -- the idiots and idio-imbeciles -- provided for in institu-tions suited to their needs, and we relieved of the odium as well as the care, the better class of improvables will drift more freely from them to us, and we thus be enabled to extend our legitimate work of training to embrace the trade schools, which shall give life-long occupation to these children that sit in darkness and shadow. Not only must we be enabled to re-lieve the schools and to press forward ourselves, but soon we too will need relief from overcrowded conditions.

Having trained, What shall we do with the imbecile? is the question for those who send -- for us who receive -- to ponder. A question that has been fittingly addressed to a national as-sembly, of national importance, and requiring national legis-lation and provision, is one to be gravely considered by the whole nation.