THE PROBLEMS OF COMPARATIVE PSYCHOLOGY. 39 



form contributes to the development of the sentiments of kinship, 

 family pride, altruism, and many social virtues. We thus have 

 reason to connect education, family government, together with the 

 rich emotional capabilities, the complex intellectual powers that 

 follow in their train, with the apparently insignificant fact that 

 the human infant enters life in a much less mature condition than 

 the young of other species. 



We have thus far been occupied in comparing stages of animal 

 with stages of human development ; we shall now test the validity 

 of the same train of thought in the comparison of different stages 

 of human progress. It would appear that among less civilized 

 peoples there is a shortening of the pre-adult period, a precocity 

 of development, an earlier abandonment by the parent, an earlier 

 independence of the young. Mr. Spencer tells us that in equatorial 

 Africa the children are described as " absurdly precocious," that 

 among the west Africans the youth are " remarkably sharp when 

 under puberty — that epoch, as among the Hindus, seeming to addle 

 their brains." An interesting result of this difference is the early 

 wane of the powers of receiving new ideas, and the consequent 

 limitations of the mental horizon. The civilized mind at first lags 

 behind the uncivilized, but the latter soon comes nearly to a stand- 

 still, and is then immeasurably outstripped by the continued 

 growth of the former. Thus — still drawing upon Mr. Spencer's 

 facts — of the Australians it is said that " after twenty their men- 

 tal vigor seems to decline, and at the age of forty seems nearly 

 extinct " ; of the Sandwich-Islanders, " that in all the early parts 

 of their education they are exceedingly quick, but not in the 

 higher branches ; that they have excellent memories, and learn by 

 rote with wonderful rapidity, but will not exercise their thinking 

 faculties " ; of New-Zealanders, that " at ten years of age [they] 

 are more intelligent than English boys, but as a rule few New-Zea- 

 landers could be taught to equal Englishmen in their highest fac- 

 ulties." Sir Samuel Baker says of the negro in Africa, that in 

 childhood he is in advance in intellectual quickness of the white 

 child of the same age, " but the mind does not expand — it prom- 

 ises fruit, but does not ripen " ; and the educators of the negro in 

 this country have encountered similar difficulties — great aptitude 

 at beginnings, but inability to go on to original thinking. 



The comparison regarding the uniformity of minds whose pe- 

 riod of development is relatively brief will apply to widely differ- 

 ing human races. There can be little doubt that primitive people 

 are more like one another than are individuals belonging to a 

 higher mental type, and in the different classes of a civilized com- 

 munity there is greater individuality among the educated than 

 among the uneducated, and this can hardly be unrelated to the 

 postponement of independence, the longer education, which the 



