_The Farmer and the Stork._ "Teaches the stork to look where he steps." "Not to be cruel like the farmer." "Not to tell lies." "Not to butt into other people's things." "To be kind to birds." "Teaches us how to get rid of troublesome people." "Never go with anything else." The following are the responses of an 18-year-old delinquent (intelligence level 10 years) to the five fables:-- _Maid and Eggs._ "She was thinking about getting the dress and spilled the milk. Teaches selfishness." _Hercules and the Wagoner._ "He wanted to help the oxen out." _Fox and Crow._ "Guess that's where the fox got his name--'Old Foxy.' Don't teach us anything." _Farmer and Stork._ "Try and help the stork out of the field." _Miller, Son, and Donkey._ "They was all big fools and mean to the donkey." One does not require very profound psychological insight to see that a person of this degree of comprehension is not promising material for moral education. His weakness in the ability to generalize a moral situation is not due to lack of instruction, but is inherent in the nature of his mental processes, all of which have the infantile quality of average 9- or 10-year intelligence. Well-instructed normal children of 10 years ordinarily succeed no better. The ability to draw the correct lesson from a social situation is little developed below the mental level of 12 or 13 years. The test is also valuable because it throws light on the subject's ability to appreciate the finer shades of meaning. The mentally retarded often show marked inferiority in this respect. They sense, perhaps, in a general way the trend of the story, but they fail to comprehend much that to us seems clearly expressed. They do not get what is left for the reader to infer, because they are insensible to the thought fringes. It is these which give meaning to the fable. The dull subject may be able to image the objects and activities described, but taken in the rough such imagery gets him nowhere. Finally, the test is almost free from the danger of coaching. The subject who has been given a number of fables along with twenty-five or thirty other tests can as a rule give only hazy and inaccurate testimony as to what he has been put through. Moreover, we have found that, even if a subject has previously heard a fable, that fact does not materially increase his chances of giving a correct interpretation. If the situation depicted in the fable is beyond the subject's power of comprehension even explicit instruction has little effect upon the quality of the response.