I recapitulate: With men on the educational level and at the age that
comes in question for their first appointment in the service of an
electric railway company, the test proposed ought to be applied
according to this scheme. If they make more than 20 mistakes, they
ought to be excluded; if they make less than 20 mistakes, the number
of omissions is to be multiplied by 10 and added to the number of
seconds. If the sum is less than 350, their mental fitness for the
avoidance of accidents is very high, between 350 and 450 fair, and
more than 550 not acceptable under any conditions. I submit this,
however, with the emphasis on my previous statement that the
investigation is still in its first stage, and that it will need a
long coöperation between science and industry in order to determine
the desirable modifications and special conditions which may become
necessary in making the employment of men partly dependent upon such
psychological tests. There can be no doubt that the experiments could
be improved in many directions. But even in this first, not adequately
tested, form, an experimental investigation of this kind which demands
from each individual hardly 10 minutes would be sufficient to exclude
perhaps one fourth of those who are nowadays accepted into the service
as motormen. This 25 per cent of the applicants do not deserve any
blame. In many other occupations they might render excellent service;
they are neither careless nor reckless, and they do not act against
instructions, but their psychical mechanism makes them unfit for that
particular combination of attention and imagination which ought to be
demanded for the special task of the motorman. If the many thousands
of injury and the many hundreds of death cases could be reduced by
such a test at least to a half, then the conditions of transportation
would have been improved more than by any alterations in the technical
apparatus, which usually are the only objects of interest in the
discussion of specialists. The whole world of industry will have to