78 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
learn a trade suitable to their intellectual ability, none the less have they succeeded in improving them to such a degree that they have been able to regain the intellectual level of other chil- dren with whom they have been in class and to move forward with these. They have awakened dormant qualities which, with many children, do not appear until a certain epoch of existence, but which appear earlier in others, who have fortunately met in their way intelligent and devoted teachers who understood how to employ special methods of instruction.
Dr. Keller, of Copenhagen, has undertaken this noble task in Denmark with genuine success, as his excellent recent report demonstrates. In England Drs. Shuttleworth and Fletcher Beach have obtained brilliant results. In the United States the works published by the National Conference of Charities and Correction prove that such rational educational enterprises for the children of the working people deserve encouragement. But in my opinion Germany bears the palm for laborious and incessant labor. Dur- ing the last four years a journal has been published there for teachers, entitled Die Kinderfehler — Zeitschrift fiir pddagogische Pathologie und Therapie in Hans, Schule und socialem Leben. This periodical is published under the learned direction of the cele- brated alienist J. L. A. Koch ; of Ch. Ufer, director of the schools of Reichenbach at Altenburg; of Dr. Zimmer, professor of theol- ogy at Herborn, and of J. Triiper, director of the special asylum for feeble-minded children at Sophienbade, near Jena. This journal counts among its collaborators all in the world who are interested in this kind of reform for children, and its scientific contents deserve to be known by all who are occupied with social questions.
In Belgium, although there are four asylums for backward children in this country, there is only one real specialist, Dr. Jean de Maar, of Brussels, who occupies himself seriously with this question. Personally, when I was attached once to the hospice of Guislain at Ghent, I, as well as my predecessor. Dr. B. Ingels, encountered insuperable obstacles in the effort to introduce the new modes of instruction with backward children.
In brief, it has been established that the results obtained are
