of the cripples are endowed with perfectly normal mental powers. It is even maintained that from such children, if they are otherwise healthy, we can, with comparatively trifling effort, obtain useful members of society. There is no doubt that when once such children have been born, we must do the best we can for them and with them. They must either be destroyed, or, in default of this, must be developed and educated to the fullest extent of their powers; unless this is done, great evil ensues, for the children become permanently dependent upon public assistance; or else (and this applies especially to the feeble-minded) become confirmed criminals. When the defect is a serious one, such children should on no account be brought up in the family circle, or educated in ordinary schools; it is absolutely necessary to provide special schools and institutions for each class of such defectives--blind schools, deaf-mute schools, cripple schools, &c. Feeble-minded children, however, whose mental level is only a very little below the average, or who are merely backward from a temporary retardation of development, may be educated in the ordinary schools, or in special classes of these schools. Children with defective hearing should not attend the public elementary school. Even if such a child is exceptionally talented, and if it receives the greatest possible amount of help at home, these circumstances will not make up for the educational defects inevitably attendant upon its deafness. As soon as examination by the school doctor shows that serious defect of hearing exists, or if such defect is obvious even before medical examination has been made, the child should be transferred to a special class or to a special school for the deaf. As far as I am aware, such institutions exist as yet only in Berlin. In the treatment of defective children, the school teachers as well as the doctors have a very important part to play. It is best that those who teach such children should themselves have received specialised medical and educational training. It was not until the beginning of the latter half of the eighteenth century that any serious effort was made to grapple with the problem of the education of the blind and the deaf-mutes; it was more than a hundred years later before the problems of the education of feeble-minded and of crippled children respectively began to receive serious attention.