ABSTRACT
The person most directly responsible for making intelligence a scientific and measurable concept was a Victorian polymath and genius, Sir Francis Galton, born in 1822, a half-cousin of Charles Darwin; he made seminal contributions in a variety of fields. Alfred Binet was convinced that intelligence is embodied in the total personality, and in fact regarded "intelligence" merely as the average of a large number of faculties, such as memory, verbal abilities, numerical ability, that were relatively independent, and should be measured separately. Intelligence seems to be made up like a hierarchy—at the bottom many thousands of test items. These correlate to form separate groups or factors, measuring different faculties. Statistical analysis of the results is very important in deciding on questions relating to the validity of intelligence tests, that is, the question of whether tests really measure "intelligence.".
