All properly constructed mental tests are, therefore, in effect, attempts to reproduce or project upon a laboratory scale situations such as the subject is or may be called upon to meet in actual life. It is obvious that ability to analyze quickly and propound immediately the correct course of action when the situation presented is unusual and outside the range of every-day experience indicates clearly the possession of mental ability greater than is required to meet only ordinary and familiar situations. The theory of the mental test as a reproduction in miniature of actual situations is thus commented on by Daniel W. La Rue: “It is useless to ask a savage what he would do if he missed his train, or an old bachelor what he would do when the baby cried, or a green soldier how he will behave when a shell bursts near him. Further, just which of many millions of situations are so important, or so typical, or so closely correlated with a web of others, similar or dissimilar, that they should be admitted among the select few that form a test? The answer is coming as a slow deposit from the stream of experience and experiment.” Doctor La Rue, pursuing the same theme, points out with sound philosophy the necessity for grading mental tests to fit the apparent or previously known mental level of the subject. “We must beware how we use a high-level test to measure low-level intelligence. If our scales are set to weigh nothing less than a hundred pounds or upward, we cannot tell accurately the weight of an eighty-pound man. In particular, since devisers of tests are usually expert in the use of literary symbols, and since ordinary test conditions limit seriously the possible variety of responses open to the subject, we slide easily into the belief that a dextrous manipulation of symbols is the prime display of intelligence. No doubt it is true that in an ideally developed brain the language centres (tracts) are well webbed up with every other trait-tract. Ideally, to experience anything is to be able to utter it. But the stammering lover is matched by the stammering thinker, and there certainly may be intelligent action without the power to put it adequately into words. Probably Cæsar is the only great general who could describe a battle as finely as he could plan it or fight it. Words without deeds, deeds without words: we must be prepared for both. Our old test question, ‘Why should we judge a person by what he does rather than by what he says?’ applies to the test itself.”