Practical applications of heredity / by Paul Popenoe.

  • Paul Popenoe
Date:
1930
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: Practical applications of heredity / by Paul Popenoe. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    dates, names, places, or events. Geographical names of obscure and little-known places, dates of significant or insignificant historical events, names of important or unimportant persons, if once known are never for gotten. He is a characteristic mental defective, but not of low-grade. Eugene Hoskins, a pure black in Mississippi, has, on the contrary, a mental age of only eight. His auditory memory span is relatively short—he failed on five digits, which a normal six-year-old should repeat. By sheer effort, however, Eugene has com mitted to memory a large array of facts relating to dates, places, and particularly locomotive numbers. In the years 1921-4, given the month, day, and year, he will at once name the day of the week; or if given the year and month, and asked what day of the month was the second Tuesday, or the fourth Friday, he never fails. At the time of the examination he was extending this ability to the year 1925. In this case it is clear that the information was acquired merely by hard work, and the explanation offered is that he had not enough sense to know any better. If he had been normal he would not have been willing to spend all his effort on acquiring useless information. This explanation is acceptable so far as it goes, but again it seems to fall short. Such cases as that of Mark, and many others in the older literature, indi-