Recently we made a rapid examination of the heads of fifty-eight school children, and noticed that eighteen of them had some stigma, especially an abnormal shape of the ear. We therefore find stigmata amongst children at the average school level. But of these fifty-eight school children only one had four abnormalities--malformed ears, strabismus, prognathism, and slight scaphocephaly. The others had a maximum of two. The first child alone is certainly defective. In a class of nine defective children subjected to a similar examination, we found only one who had but one stigma, another had two, four had three, and three had five. Of the three last, one had a very high degree of retardation; another was mentally ill-balanced to no less a degree. Let us compare these two groups, the one of fifty-eight average children, the other of nine defectives, and group to group, the difference is very clear. The stigmata are usually more numerous when the children are mentally defective. The existence of stigmata is a presumption of deficiency, and this presumption is greater, the greater the number of stigmata. If we consider which are the stigmata that are most commonly met with, we find that asymmetry of the face is almost constant, but we also find it sometimes in normal children. Malformations of the ear come next. We are often struck by the frequency of badly defective speech--three times in nine defectives, whilst we did not find a single example in the fifty-eight school children taken by chance. Here, then, is a "group fact" which is of interest from a scientific point of view. But what use can be made of it for individual diagnosis? This is much more delicate, for even if one could state it as a general rule that defectives have more stigmata than the normal, this rule is subject to important exceptions. One of our abnormal cases had only one stigma, another had two, and in both cases the anomalies were of a very ordinary kind--slight want of symmetry of the face and sticking out ears. Children with stigmata few in number, and little marked (though as a rule we note the presence of stigmata without measuring them), may therefore not be of normal intelligence. The same is true sometimes of children with no stigma at all. We may therefore conclude that stigmata may be taken into account when we are making an examination, but they should never be regarded as of fundamental importance in diagnosis.