are paying dearly. And when navies and armies become active in their work of destroying, the activity adds to these wastes, that of the actual destruction and its aftermath, burnt and wrecked cities and villages, farms and homes of men, and their mutilations and annihilation. These are the superwaste of ill-will. Whether man can avoid war is hard to say: if it be not a necessity, then it is the supreme example of waste in the life of man, the ghastly tribute which an evil will has laid upon the human race.

The terrors of the last war will probably be completely eclipsed by wars to come. The intellectual ineptitude, which drew distinctions between belligerents and non-belligerents, and between mutilation and death by explosives or by poisongases, has passed from the thought of those who see clearly. War in all forms is a devilish disaster—a thing which ought not to be. It is now seen by intelligent thinkers that, if resorted to, any limitation of its horrid incidence is futile. And as a consequence it is more clearly recognised that it is an injury alike to vanquished and victor, even if the victory is complete. It is a superwaste, against the occurrence of which the best thought of mankind is sorely needed to find a remedy. But considerations of the remedy carry us far-afield.

Man is an organism with the control and direction of the power of reproduction, and this is fundamentally involved in the issue because population cannot increase at its present rate for even four centuries. All man's relationships, whether individual or collective, can be made the subject of systematic study. The world has, in a certain sense, now become an economic solidarity, but it is not also a political solidarity. Strife and its consequent waste arise from the non-adjustment of the elements of his being in their mutual relations. If he is not to suffer more and more grievously the colossal destruction and anguish and the wastages of war, then the supreme change that is necessary is that which inheres in the fundamental policy of his life; in short, whether this policy is to be egoism or to take account of the rights of others. And this question demands the closest examination. It cannot here be set forth.

The lesson for Australia, however, is briefly this: War is still a contingency to be taken into serious account. Australia is a splendid but unpopulated heritage from the Mother land; and failure to utilise its resources so that the creation of great wealth and population for its defence is possible, is a failure of the most momentous character. It is the supreme waste, the waste of resource and opportunity. Such waste

will leave us at the mercy of those who desire or who are forced to extend their boundaries.

This waste, the waste of national opportunity, is that which our political and civic life should aim at avoiding; which our schools and colleges, our Universities and scientific institutions, our Parliaments, should take into account, so that the challenge of our right to occupy, when it comesand it cannot be long delayed-will find us developed and prepared, ready to make that sacrifice of life and property through which alone, in the world's present stage of ethical development, we can hope to avoid disaster to our national existence.

WHAT IS THE I.Q.?

By

A. H. MARTIN, M.A., Ph.D., Lecturer on Psychology, University of Sydney.

N 1908 Dr. Alfred Binet and his colleague, Dr. T. Simon, gave to the world a new method of measuring intelligence, based on the principle of age gradations. By taking a

number of promiscuous tasks of increasing difficulty he set out a "mental footrule" whereon the norms of average achievement for each year were registered. Thus the average child of three should be able to distinguish the main parts of the body and point to them on request, while at the age of the ability to distinguish between "rightness and leftness," and the application of these differences to his left and right sides should be readily made. Immediate memory or "memory span, as tested by the ability to repeat sentences or sets of digits of increasing length, was another type of task. The higher end of the age scale was marked by the inclusion of questions demanding powers of abstraction; the comprehension of a moral situation, a differentiation of qualities of objects and the ability to define abstractions, were types of this form of exercise,

Once the position of average age achievements was fixed on this scale of intelligence, the examiner who used it was enabled to say with certainty that certain children were normal in intelligence, while others lagged behind, and still others were accelerated in relation to their "birthday" or chronological age. In the latter cases their "mental ages" as found by the intelligence scale method, differed from their chronological ages. Let it be supposed that such measurements be expressed as follows:

Though the chronological ages differ so widely in these individuals, yet, in so far as native intelligence and comprehension of a situation goes, they could well be grouped in the same school grade for instruction except for the fact of unequal development.

According to the Binet method it is necessary to mention the two age factors in discussing an individual's degree of intelligence. Such a measure is not conveniently reduced to

a plus or minus factor, for, as the years pass, it is found that such differences are not only maintained, but that the gaps tend to increase up to the period of adolescence. In short, the difference is not a fixed excess or deficiency, but rather a ratio based upon chronological age. If, then, our previous subjects were remeasured three years later, in respective years would then read:

Name.

Frank Jones

William Smith

John Brown

1921, the

If these and the preceding results be reduced to a ratio based upon the relation of chronological age to mental age, then they appear as:

Professor William Stern, who first used this measure, styled it the "Mental Coefficient or Mental Quotient."

In America the work of Binet and Stern was developed by Professor Lewis Treman into the Stanford Revision of the Binet tests. He revised and extended the original scale, and added tests to the higher end in order to measure beyond the original highest age, that of fifteen years. Terman found that the curve of intelligence-growth tended to show an increase up to the age of sixteen chronological years, when it "flattened" and gave no further rise, behaving after the fashion of that of physical height. It is therefore a paradox to speak of a mental age beyond that of sixteen years, yet tests must be available to measure the supernormal development of such subjects as No. 3. Terman got over the difficulty by styling the tests those for a "superior adult," but for calculation purposes the tests are evaluated on exactly the same principle as the tests for mental ages up to sixteen years. Terman styled the measure of intelligence thus obtained the "Intelligence Quotient"-generally abbreviated to I.Q.-a far better descriptive term than that of Mental Quotient.

Since intelligence ceases to develop after sixteen, it is obviously unfair to handicap those above this chronological age in calculating their measurement of intelligence, therefore the method used in finding the quotients of such subjects is to regard them as if their chronological age was still sixteen years. If the previous subjects, for certain purposes, should be re-examined in 1929, the results would be as follows:

I.Q. appears to

While in the main the method of the afford a correct estimation of the efficiency of an individual's intelligence, it must be admitted, even by its most earnest advocates, that there do exist some few cases where conditions of development are abnormal, Attacks of illness or periods of severe emotional stress tend to operate as such factors of disturbance. As a result the I.Q. cannot be a constant ratio, but in the light of their history such cases are generally explicable. But, where on the other hand conditions of development are normal and uneventful, then the I.Q. is looked upon as a constant and a reliable indicator of general intellectual status and efficiency.