212 DOCTRINE OF EVOLUTION 



mates and lower mammalia as regards their mental pro- 

 cesses. What facts there are, however, prove to be 

 highly significant, and they materially amplify our 

 conception of human faculty as a product of evolution. 

 The essential point is that the intellectual attain- 

 ments of various races are by no means the same. The 

 calculus is a mental product of the white race only; 

 gunpowder and printing from movable type were 

 independently invented by the Caucasian and Mon- 

 golian races ; but the American Indian and the Negro 

 never originated them. Human faculty, to employ 

 the most general term for all that distinguishes man 

 from the brutes, proves to be a very varied thing when 

 we draw comparisons between and among races with 

 independent lines of ancestry and heredity occupying 

 widely separated areas. Should we analyze it, we find 

 it to be composed of three constituents ; namely, the 

 physical elements of the brain, the degree to which the 

 observational or perceptual and higher elements co- 

 operate in building up the conceptions peculiar to the 

 type, and the materials with which the physical mechan- 

 ism deals, in the way of environmental, educational, and 

 social '^ grist for the mental mill." Many anthropolo- 

 gists accord too great an importance to the third con- 

 stituent of human faculty, I believe, and they are 

 therefore led to deny that races differ in mental respects 

 to so large a degree as the thoroughgoing evolutionist 

 would contend. They hold that differences in such 

 things as powers of observation are due to training : 

 that, for example, an American Indian or a South Sea 

 Islander sees certain things in his environment more 

 quickly than a white man only because these are the 



