=Experimental Education Series= EDITED BY M. V. O’SHEA SPECIAL TALENTS AND DEFECTS [Illustration: The MM Co.] THE MACMILLAN COMPANY NEW YORK · BOSTON · CHICAGO · DALLAS ATLANTA · SAN FRANCISCO MACMILLAN & CO., LIMITED LONDON · BOMBAY · CALCUTTA MELBOURNE THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, LTD. TORONTO SPECIAL TALENTS AND DEFECTS Their Significance for Education BY LETA S. HOLLINGWORTH, PH.D. Associate Professor of Education Teachers College, Columbia University =New York= THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 1923 _All rights reserved_ PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA COPYRIGHT, 1923 BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY Set up and electrotyped. Published August, 1923. =Norwood Press= J. S. Cushing Co.—Berwick & Smith Co. Norwood, Mass., U.S.A. TO THE MEMORY OF RUTH ELINOR STETTER A GOOD TEACHER PREFACE This book has proceeded haltingly, as must be evident in many places, for it attempts to explore and describe a field that is not well illuminated. The actual examination of those mental functions which are relatively dissociated from general intelligence has not been carried far by experimentalists. However, the problems have been sufficiently formulated, and enough evidence has been secured, to warrant attempts at gleaning implications for education, even now. Mine is the comparatively humble task of bringing together in an ordered presentation the works of original investigators, in such a way that they will be available for application. The appeal of the data is above all to educators, but also, of course, to those who deal in any office with human beings. The chief difficulty in organizing the subject has been to delimit it, as regards the psychology of the elementary school subjects on the one hand, and mental measurement on the other. It is not the purpose to cover either of these fields in the present volume. Yet so closely are they related to the study of special aptitudes in school children that it will be scarcely possible to obtain the very clearest view of what is here written without additional knowledge of these matters.