From all this we reach a very clear definition of what we mean by abnormal children, and a very simple indication of what should be done with them. Abnormal and defective children are those who are suitable for neither the ordinary school nor the asylum; for the school they are not sufficiently good, for the asylum not sufficiently bad. We must try what special schools and classes can do for them. =Statistics.=--It is important to notice that the children so defined are not a negligible quantity. Their name is legion. And since number is the factor that gives importance to every social problem, we may say that the regulation of the lot of these children is a social question of the greatest gravity. The statistics which have up till now been published abroad do not give such precise information as one could wish regarding the number of the defectives. Some give the bare figures; others, using a better method, state the proportion of mentally defective children to the total population. There is also much doubt as to the way in which the statisticians have used the term "abnormal" or "defective." One inquiry relates only to children slightly affected; another bears upon all abnormal children, including the lowest grades of idiocy, and is therefore much more comprehensive. In other cases we are not told how the selection was made. As to France, precise information has not been available until last year, when two inquiries were held--one at the instance of the Ministerial Commission, the other organised by the Minister of the Interior. According to the former inquiry, we find that the proportion of defectives amounts to scarcely 1 per cent. for the boys, and O.9 per cent. for the girls. These percentages are evidently far too small, and we ourselves have discovered, by a small private inquiry, that many schools returned "none" in the questionnaires distributed, although the headmasters have admitted to us that they possessed several genuine defectives. In Paris, M. Vaney, a headmaster, made some investigations by the arithmetical test, which we shall explain presently, and reached the conclusion that 2 per cent. of the school population of two districts were backward. If we were to include the ill-balanced, whose number is probably equal to that of the backward, the proportion would be about 4 per cent. Lastly, and quite recently, a special and most careful inquiry was made at Bordeaux, under the direction of M. Thamin, by alienists and the school medical inspectors, and it was found that the percentage of abnormality amongst the boys was 5.17. Probably the true percentage is somewhere in the neighbourhood of 5. All these inquiries are comparable because they all deal with the school population. The great variation in the figures is due to several causes, the chief of which are the following: (1) The proportion of the abnormal varies to a surprising extent in different schools even in the same neighbourhood. Dr.