As mentioned above, we found that the boy had entirely
misled us.
We then entered upon a systematic study of the boy's abilities
and found some strange contrasts. Perceptions of form and color
were normal. Given a very simple test which required some
apperceptive ability, he did fairly well. Given simple
``Construction Tests'' which required the planful handling of
concrete material, Adolf proceeded unintelligently. He showed no
foresight, was rather slow, but by following out a trial and
error procedure and with some repetition of irrational placing of
the pieces he finally succeeded. Moderate ability to profit by
trial and error was shown, but for his age the performance on
this type of test was poor. On our ``Puzzle-Box,'' which calls
for the analysis of a concrete situation, a test that is done by
boys of his age nearly always in four minutes or less, Adolf
failed in ten minutes. He began in his typically aggressive
fashion, but kept trying to solve the difficulty by the
repetition of obviously futile movements. On a ``Learning
Test,'' where numerals are associated in meaningless relation
with symbols, Adolf did the work promptly and with much
self-confidence, but made a thoroughly irrational error, inasmuch
as he associated the same numeral with two different symbols--and
did not see his error.
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