448Section IV.R. Dupuy.
is a certain correspondence of clinical type, somewhat artificial it is true,
and yet which we can label with terms such as myxoedamatous, mongolians,
sexual inverts, fatty dystrophies, and other terms which would indefinitely
prolong this list.
A special bodily dystrophy, which often accompanies backwardness, is
characterised by a juvenile senility, which deserves a special place in our
account. It shows once again that the state of backwardness is a mixed
phenomenon, and that it includes both retardation and perversion of the
natural evolution.
The psychical anomalies have specially attracted the attention of teachers
and neurologists. They are such as parents themselves notice, and for
which they come for advice.
This explains to us why the term “ backward ” is applied—wrongly—
by a number of authors, specially to indicate patients who show intellectual
deficiency. Psychical defects, like bodily defects, consist in retardation, arrest and
regression, but also in perversions of faculties. With these patients, judg
ment, reflection, the moral sense, co-ordination of ideas, the faculty of com
prehension, are either absent or defective. On the other hand, we often see
in them a more or less marked ability for such and such a branch of intel
lectual ability.
Anomalies of will enable us to divide up these patients to a certain
degree. We meet, in fact, the will-less, the asthenic, the apathetic types,
which make the first category, and the unstable and the fussy people who
cannot fix their attention, who enter into the second group.
Anomalies of instinct also frequently occur. They may be met with in
many different combinations which indicate a state of backwardness. We
find, for instance, cowardice and suicide, loss of appetite or gluttony, theft
or prodigality, egotism or exaggerated sentimentality, and various perver
sions of the sexual instinct such as onanism, sadism, inversion, or exhibi
tionism. The perversions of instinct produce numerous troubles which can
be so accentuated as to come under the name of dementia. It is impossible
to establish a line of division between backwardness, perversion, and
insanity. In any case the backward children present numerous defects which pre
vent their mixture with society : brutality towards animals, anger, envy,
jealousy, cowardice, laziness, lying, cruelty.
The anomalies of speech are characterised by mutism in deaf people, and
by defects of speech—such as pidgin-language—in the patients who are
lacking in ideation.
Stammering shows a lack of co-ordination in the function of the
speech organs. Defects of pronunciation are very numerous. They
may be grouped under the head of lisping, which consists in the sub
stitution, the suppression, or the faulty production of a letter in the
