ABSTRACT
The many criticisms following the accusations of scientific fraud made against Sir Cyril Burt toward the end of 1976 quickly grew into a campaign of strangely virulent vilification that has been sustained from that day to this. The most unwarranted distortions and misrepresentations of his studies and views have been put forward, and aggressively and widely popularised. The attack on Burt has clearly stemmed from ideological and personal feelings of the most powerful kind—some understandable, some obscure. The nature of the prosecution so far makes necessary a clear statement of a few other specific points of a preliminary nature. One central and essential feature of a trial is the careful cross-examination of witnesses. Burt introduced tests of mental ability to probe beyond these disadvantages, to discover the child's true ability being masked by them, and he deliberately employed nonverbal kinds of tests having discovered that even the language required in normal tests was itself a distorting obstacle.
