brain. If you will look at the faces of the children and the men and women published in such a record as the Elmira yearbook, first when they enter the institution, and then six months, twelve months, or eighteen months later, after they have felt the force of self-activity directed to some good end, you will be convinced, I am sure, that Ormuzd has been at work. And this intellectual betterment of the feeble-minded, and this straightening up of the morally oblique, are the result of definite reactions brought about in the brain tissue, in the tool itself; are organic, and as such are permanent and nonforfeitable.
What is true at all is true in the extreme. We have taken the extreme at the minus end of humanity; let us take now, somewhat more briefly, the extreme at the plus end. Never before, I think, was there such a keen interest as now in the popular and experimental study of the mind. Francis Galton opened the way in such books as Inquiries into Human Faculty and its Development, and Hereditary Genius. There is wide interest in the experimental work of psychologists. Even such morbid books as Lombroso's Man of Genius and Max Nordau's Degeneration attract thousands of readers, as well as the reply that Dr. Hirsch has made in Genius and Degeneration. These studies have concerned themselves quite as much with genius as with the normal and deficient. There is the reservation that the material for study is not so abundant. At Elwyn there are about one thousand deficient children. I think you could not find the same number of geniuses brought together at any one place, perhaps not even at Harvard. The results are, therefore, more meager and more uncertain. There has always been thought to be an intimate connection between genius and insanity, and, as you know, one extreme view is that genius is only a beneficent form of insanity. In most of our State institutions the insane and the deficient are put into the same general class, but in reality they represent the organic extremes. But while insanity and genius stand at the same end of mentality they are not, in spite of Lombroso and Nordau, to be in any way confounded. Both represent an excess of organization, a delicate bit of machinery capable of doing the finest work or of getting the most seriously out of repair. The very fact of genius seems to be made possible only by the disproportionate development of some part of the brain. If this take place and leave the other portions at least normally active, the result is beneficent, and there is no affiliation with insanity. But if such an overdevelopment take place at the expense of neighboring centers, sooner or later there comes an occultation of some of the other powers, and insanity results. In a rough way this explains, I think, the relation between genius and insanity. Both are an overbalance. They have this in
