When the three examiners meet in order to judge the degree of retardation of the children who are presented to them, is this absence of a definite programme embarrassing? We do not think so. A committee which is duly authorised always manages to do something. The work is done more or less empirically, perhaps, but it is done. Tell the jury to find defective children, and they are sure to find them. The only question is, What will be the value of their selection? and, above all, How can so delicate a quest be saved from empiricism and rendered exact? It is to be hoped that at first there will not be too many mistakes. This would have a bad effect upon the new institution. It is unfair to a normal child to send him to a special school, just as it is unfair to a defective to keep him in the ordinary school. It is better to make such mistakes as seldom as possible. Moreover, it is of the greatest interest to try to forecast the exact way in which errors are most likely to arise. In every machine there is a point of least resistance which requires to be watched. In every human institution there is a detail of organisation where fraud and charlatanism are most liable to occur. Since we have supervised the organisation of some classes for defectives, and have been able by some preliminary observations to take account of these dangers, we take it upon ourselves to give warning of them in advance. We fix buoys to the rocks that they may be avoided. It seems to us that the selection of defectives calls for three varieties of experience--that of teachers, of doctors, and of psychologists. We shall proceed to indicate the services which these various persons may render. In this chapter we shall speak only of the pedagogical examination. The duty of making the first selection among the school-children and indicating those who are suspected of being defective belongs partly to the teachers and partly to the school inspectors, whose respective rôles, it seems to us, can easily be defined. A. THE RÔLE OF THE TEACHER: TO SELECT THE CHILDREN SUSPECTED OF BEING DEFECTIVE. It is out of the question to make an entire school pass before a committee in order that 500 pupils may have their mental faculties analysed. Such a task, at once troublesome and useless, would require several months. One should rather, in the first place, adopt a rapid method of picking out the children _suspected of mental defect_. It is quite sufficient that they should be suspected. Such a selection once made, the committee will have before it only a moderate number of candidates upon whom it will be possible to concentrate attention. Let us proceed to show how the teachers may make their selection: