men_ usually suggest to the more intelligent children
a sentence like "Men work for their money" (or "because they need
money," etc.), while the dull child is more likely to give some such
sentence as "The men have work and they don't have much money." That is,
the sentence of the dull child, even though correct in structure and
free enough from outright absurdity to satisfy the standard of scoring
which we have set forth, is likely to express ideas which are more or
less nondescript, ideas not logically suggested by the set of words
given.

[65] "Ueber eine neue Methode der Intelligenzpruefung und ueber den Wert
der Kombinationsmethoden," in _Zeitschrift fuer Paedagogische Psychologie
und Experimentelle Paedagogik_ (1912), pp. 145-63.

The experiment is one of the many forms of the "completion test," or
"the combination method." As we have already noted, the power to combine
more or less separate and isolated elements into a logical whole is one
of the most essential features of intelligence. The ability to do so in
a given case depends, in the first place, upon the number and logical
quality of the associations which have previously been made with each of
the given elements separately, and in the second place, upon the
readiness with which these ideational stores yield up the particular
associations necessary for weaving the given words into some kind of
unity. The child must pass from what is given to what is not given but
merely suggested. This requires a certain amount of invention. Scattered
fragments must be conceived as the skeleton of a thought, and this
skeleton, or partial skeleton, must be assembled and made whole. The
task is analogous to that which confronts the palaeontologist, who is
able to reconstruct, with a high degree of certainty, the entire
skeleton of an extinct animal from the evidence furnished by three or
four fragments of bones. It is no wonder, therefore, that subjects whose
ideational stores are scanty, and whose associations are based upon
accidental rather than logical connections, find the test one of
peculiar difficulty. Invention thrives in a different soil.

Binet located this test in year X. Goddard and Kuhlmann assign it the
same location, though their actual statistics agree closely with our
own. Our procedure makes the test somewhat easier than that of Binet,
who gave only one trial and used the somewhat more difficult words
_Paris_, _river_, _fortune_. Others have generally fol