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This book, “the first of its kind,”is a study by the director of the Psychological Laboratory at Amsterdam, of the young Hungarian pianist, Erwin Nyiregyházi. The author tells us in the introductory chapter that “on his first meeting with this remarkable child he had a strong impression that he was in the presence of a most interesting case, and he therefore profited by the occasion … to carry out a systematic investigation of an infant prodigy.”His purpose, he says further, was “to discover the extent of his mental capacity and endowment, and, in connection with this, to establish what influences determined the development of his musical talent.”The former he carried out by the use of various tests of mental capacity, notably the Binet, supplemented by questions and conversations designed to bring out the boy's mental abilities, and by an analysis of the elementary acoustic and musical faculties; the latter he seems to have attempted by a careful inquiry into the child's family history and his development during infancy, in addition to first-hand observation from his seventh to his thirteenth year.
By the use of intelligence tests the author succeeded in establishing Erwin's mental development as at least three years in advance of his age. But he pertinently remarks that these means of measuring the intelligence, especially of gifted children, are very inadequate because they do not display what he considers most remarkable in his case, i.e. the brilliance