The elements of reading thus far considered are those that contribute to mechanics. Reading to recognize forms and to pronounce words is to be distinguished psychologically and pedagogically from reading for the _understanding_ of sentences. Every teacher of much experience in the elementary school will be able to recall children who could read fluently from the printed page, but could not tell what they had read, nor answer questions about the context. In reading to grasp meaning, additional processes, more difficult to perform, are involved, beyond those required to “see and say” the words. As would be expected, the ability to master the mechanics of reading is more loosely correlated with general intelligence than is ability to _comprehend_ the matter read. The comprehension of meaning is a very large factor in intelligence. It might almost be maintained that intelligence is grasp of meaning. A child who has perfected the mechanics of reading, understands what is read in accordance with his general intelligence, as correlations prove. Gates has shown that even in the case of children who are quite deficient in oral reading, the correspondence between general intelligence and comprehension of the context in silent reading, as revealed in answers to questions about the material read, is very much higher than would be believed probable. Such a child, using his lame mechanics, draws meaning from fragments, in accordance with his general intelligence. On the other hand, young children are sometimes found, who have become very fluent in mechanical reading, who can thus read very abstruse matter, without getting any meaning from what they read, because of the limitations of general intellectual development. As a result of his studies of “Reading as Reasoning,” Thorndike observes: “Reading may be wrong or inadequate (1) because of wrong connection with words singly, (2) because of over-potency or under-potency of elements, (3) because of failure to treat the ideas produced by the reading as provisional and to inspect, and welcome or reject them.” This third cause of inferior reading is found invariably in children of low IQ, for to read in this way, understandingly, involves the weighing of many elements in a sentence, their organization in the proper relations to one another, and the selection and rejection of connotations—all functions of general intelligence. It is by tests of such functions that IQ is determined. Therefore, it is not surprising that comprehension in reading is so highly correlated with IQ, among school children of the same age. It is between IQ and mechanical ability to read words, that marked discrepancies may occasionally exist, as illustrative cases show. IV. WORD BLINDNESS