ars.

No special classes for the instruction of retarded children were found
in any of the rural schools of the county.

In addition to the 214 children who were retarded and exceptionally
retarded, three epileptics and two constitutionally inferior children
were found among the school children of the county."

These interesting investigations do not, of course, disclose the full
amount of mental defectiveness in the localities studied, because they
are based on a survey of the children at school and because they
especially take up the matter of retardation and feeble-mindedness. It
is no uncommon thing in the small rural community to find the more
troublesome feeble-minded child withdrawn from the school. The reports
suggest that a wider investigation would increase the number of
defective children, for the method chosen could hardly be expected to
discern all the seriously neurotic children. The information gathered
indicates that epilepsy and the neurotic predisposition to insanity need
to be investigated as well as amentia,[5] and that the epileptics and
neurotics, even among rural children, are more numerous than is usually
supposed. Of course an investigation of the adults would still more
increase the amount of mental abnormality.

The sociologist is familiar with the social menace of the degenerate
family in the country. Most of the members of the families thus far
studied have lived in the country or small village. It is reasonable to
suppose that on the whole such families find it easier to survive in the
country than in the city. The country offers occupation for the high
grades during the busy season and yet does not require steady employment
all through the year. The social penalties of mental inferiority are not
likely to be so oppressive; certainly there is much less danger of
coming into collision with the law. Our institutions find from
experience that the feeble-minded take kindly to rough, out-door work
and from this it is natural to assume that a large number of the
feeble-minded, free to choose their environment, prefer the country to
the city. They are probably more often handicapped by the competition of
city life than by the conditions of life in the rural community.

It is probably true also that the feeble-minded family is more likely to
renew its vitality by the mixing in of new, normal blood in the country
than in the city. Illegitimacy holds in the problem of rural
feeble-mindedness the