Miss Charlotte G. Garrison and Miss Agnes Burke, teachers in the Horace Mann School, Teachers College, New York City, thereupon nominated the child who is called E in this monograph. E was presented at the next meeting of the class. It required two full classroom periods to test this child to the limits of the Stanford-Binet Scale, which had just then been published. E exhausted the scale without being fully measured by it, achieving an IQ of _at least_ 187. He was on that date 8 years 4 months old. This IQ of at least 187 placed E in Galton's Class X of able persons; i.e., more than six "grades" removed from mediocrity. Taking 1 PE#dis# as one "grade," it placed him _at least_ plus 11 PE from the norm; for 1 PE (Probable Error) equals 8 IQ, according to Terman's original distribution of 905 school children. [1] This appeared as sufficiently striking to warrant permanent recording, since it would rate E as one in a million for statistical frequency, assuming "zeal and power of working" to be also abundantly present. I did not at that time have any expert knowledge of highly intelligent children. I had been working for some years in the hospitals of New York City with persons presented for commitment to reformatories, prisons, and institutions for mental defectives. I had tested thousands of incompetent persons, a majority of them children, with Goddard's Revision of the Binet-Simon Scale, scarcely ever finding anyone with an IQ rating as high as 100. This thoroughgoing experience of the negative aspects of intelligence rendered the performance of E even more impressive to me than it would otherwise have been. I perceived the clear and flawless working of his mind against a contrasting background of thousands of dull and foolish minds. It was an unforgettable observation. I then began to look for children like E, to observe them with reference to the principles of education. This search has been conducted in a desultory manner, in "odd" moments, ever since 1916. At times, as in 1922-1923 and in 1935-1936, when pupils were being sought for special classes at Public School 165, Manhattan, or at Public School 500, Manhattan, the search has been systematic. Usually, however, the quest has been quite otherwise, for in the course of long searching I have learned that it is nearly useless to _look_ for these children, because so few of them exist. In twenty-three years' seeking in New York City and the local metropolitan area, the densest center of population in this country and at the same time a great intellectual center attracting able persons, I have found only twelve children who test at or above 180 IQ (S-B). This number represents the winnowing from thousands of children tested, hundreds of them brought for the testing because of their mental gifts. Of course there were and are others who have not been found, since [this] search has never been exhaustive.