As has been stated, the first cases of inferiority in reading were reported by ophthalmologists, who, upon discovering nothing wrong with the visual apparatus of the child brought for examination, pronounced the difficulty to be word blindness or “congenital alexia.” In using these terms, they reasoned from analogy with pathological cases of selective loss of function in adults, referred to by us in Chapter III. The first cases reported from this point of view were, so far as the present writer can determine, those of Kerr and those of Morgan, both reporting in 1896. After these, a number of individual cases were reported in France, England, Germany, and the United States. In 1915, Schröck and Clemesha respectively summarized all literature to that date, the former presenting a bibliography of thirty-two titles. The great drawback to clear interpretation of these cases is that general intelligence was not measured. Some, at least, of the children were feeble-minded, for we find cited as evidence of good general endowment, performances which we now know to be typical of children much younger than those being described. Hinshelwood, an ophthalmologist, published in 1917 a general discussion of non-readers, from the medical standpoint. According to his treatment of the subject, non-readers constitute a group apart, defined by some congenital, pathological defect in brain structure, but for which they would have read normally. This concept is directly derived from analogy with cases of _lost_ function in diseased persons. “By the term congenital word blindness, we mean a congenital defect occurring in children with otherwise normal and undamaged brains characterized by a difficulty in learning to read so great that it is manifestly due to a pathological condition, and where the attempts to teach the child by the ordinary methods have completely failed.... The recognition of this condition was the direct outcome and result of the previously acquired knowledge of those symptoms of cerebral disease, which we have been studying.... No doubt it is a comparatively common thing to find some who lag considerably behind their fellows, because of their slowness and difficulty in acquiring their visual word memories, but I regard these slight defects as only physiological variations, and not to be regarded as pathological conditions. It becomes a source of confusion to apply to such cases, as has been done of late, the term congenital word blindness, which should be reserved for the really grave degrees of this defect, which manifestly are the result of a pathological condition of the visual memory center, and which have proved refractory to all the ordinary methods of school instruction.”