It would, of course, be absurd to censure woman too greatly for these frailties, and it would be very unjust to imply that all women share them. Some women, in adapting themselves to the situation, follow apparently, a bent acquired in connection with the maternal instinct, and become true and devoted and grand to a degree hardly known by man. Others, following a bent gotten along with coquetry in connection with the wooing instinct, and having no activity through which their behavior is standardized, become difficile, unreal, inefficient, exacting, unsatisfied, absurd. And we have also the paradox that the same woman can be the two things at different times. There is therefore a basis of truth in Pope's hard saying that "Women have no characters at all." Because their problem is not to accommodate to the solid realities of the world of experience and sense, but to adjust themselves to the personality of men, it is not surprising that they should assume protean shapes.

Moreover, man is so affected by the charms of woman, and offers so easy a mark for her machinations, as to invite exploitation. Having been evolved largely through the stimulus of the female presence, he continues to be more profoundly affected by her presence and behavior than by any other stimulus whatever, unless it be the various forms of combat. From Samson and Odysseus down, history and story recognize the ease and frequency with which a woman makes a fool of a man. The male protective and sentimental attitude is indeed incompatible with resistance. To charm, pursue, court, and possess the female, involve a train of memories which color all after-relations with the whole sex. In both animals and men there is an instinctive disposition to take a great deal off the female. The male animal takes the assaults of the female complacently and shamefacedly, "just like folks." Peasants laugh at the hysterical outbreaks of their women, and the "bold, bad man" is as likely to be henpecked as any other. Woman is a disturbing element in business and in school to a degree not usually apprehended. In her presence a man instinctively assumes a different attitude. He is, in fact, so susceptible as seemingly, almost, to want to be victimized, and, as Locke expressed the matter, "It is in vain to find fault with those arts of deceiving wherein men find pleasure to be deceived."

This disposition of man and the detached condition of woman have much to do with the emergence of the adventuress and the sporting-woman. Human nature was made for action; and perhaps the most distressing and disconcerting situation which confronts it is to be played on by stimulations without the ability to function. The mere superinducing of passivity, as in the extreme case of solitary confinement, is sufficient to produce insanity; and the emotion of dread, or passive fear, is said to be the most painful of emotions, because there is no possibility of relief by action. Modern woman is in a similar condition of constraint and unrest, which produces organic ravages for which no luxury can compensate. The general ill-health of girls of the better classes, and the equally general post-matrimonial breakdown, are probably due largely to the fact that the nervous organization demands more normal stimulations and reactions than are supplied. The American woman of the better classes has superior rights and no duties, and yet she is worrying herself to death—not over specific troubles, but because she has lost her connection with reality. Many women, more intelligent and energetic than their husbands and brothers, have no more serious occupations than to play the house-cat, with or without ornament. It is a wonder that more of them do not lose their minds; and that more of them do not break with the system entirely is due solely to the inhibitive effects of early habit and suggestion.

As long as woman is comfortably cared for by the men of her group or by marriage, she is not likely to do anything rash, especially if the moral standards in her family and community are severe. But an unattached woman has a tendency to become an adventuress—not so much on economic as on psychological grounds. Life is rarely so hard that a young woman cannot earn her bread; but she cannot always live and have the stimulations she craves. As long, however, as she remains with her people and is known to the whole community, she realizes that any infraction of the habits of the group, any immodesty or immorality, will ruin her standing and her chance of marriage, and bring her into shame and confusion. Consequently, good behavior is a protective measure—instinctive, of course; for it is not true that the ordinary girl has imagination enough to think out a general attitude toward life other than that which is habitual in her group. But when she becomes detached from home and group, and is removed not only from surveillance, but from the ordinary stimulation and interest afforded by social life and acquaintanceship, her inhibitions are likely to be relaxed.

The girl coming from the country to the city affords one of the clearest cases of detachment. Assuming that she comes to the city to earn her living, her work is not only irksome, but so unremunerative that she finds it impossible to obtain those accessories to her personality in the way of finery which would be sufficient to hold her attention and satisfy her if they were to be had in plenty. She is lost from the sight of everyone whose opinion has any meaning for her, while the separation from her home community renders her condition peculiarly flat and lonely; and she is prepared to accept any opportunity for stimulation offered her, unless she has been morally standardized before leaving home. To be completely lost sight of may, indeed, become an object under these circumstances—the only means by which she can without confusion accept unapproved stimulations—and to pass from a regular to an irregular life and back again before the fact has been noted is not an unusual course.

The professionally irregular class of women represents an extreme and unfortunate result of an adventitious and not-completely-functional relation to society. They do not form a class in the psychological sense, but only a trade. There are many sorts of natural dispositions among them—as many perhaps as will be found in any other occupation. None of the reputable occupations are homogeneous from the standpoint of the natural dispositions of the men and women who compose them, and the same is true of the disreputable occupations. Many women of fine natural character and disposition are drawn in a momentary and incidental way into an irregular life, and recover, settle down to regular modes of living, drift farther, are married, and make uncommonly good wives. In this respect the adventuress is more fortunate than the criminal (that other great adventitious product), because the criminal is labeled and his record follows him, making reformation difficult; while the in-and-out life of woman with reference to what we call virtue is not officially noted and does not bring consequences so inevitable. But "if you drive nature out at the door, she will come back through the window;" and this interest in greater stimulation is, I believe, the dominant force in determining the choice—or, rather, the drift—of the so-called sporting-woman. She is seeking what, from the psychological standpoint, may be called a normal life.

The human mind was formed and fixed once for all in very early times, through a life of action and emergency, when the species was fighting, contriving, and inventing its way up from the sub-human condition; and the ground-patterns of interest have never been, and probably never will be, fundamentally changed. Consequently, all pursuits are irksome unless they are able, so to speak, to assume the guise of this early conflict for life in connection with which interest and modes of attention were developed. As a matter of fact, however, anything in the nature of a problem or a pursuit stimulates the emotional centers, and is interesting, because it is of the same general pattern as these primitive pursuits and problems. Scientific and artistic pursuits, business, and the various occupational callings are analogues of the hunting, flight, pursuit, courtship, and capture of early racial life, and the problems they present may, and do, become all-absorbing. The moral and educational problem of development has been, indeed, to substitute for the simple, co-ordinative killing, escaping, charming, deceiving activities of early life, analogues which are increasingly serviceable to society, and to expand into a general social feeling the affection developed first in connection with courtship, the rearing of children, and joint predatory and defensive enterprises. The gamester, adventuress, and criminal are not usually abnormal in a biological sense, but have failed, through defective manipulation of their attention, to get interested in the right kind of problems. Their attention has not been diverted from interests of a primary type containing a maximum of the sensory, to interests of an analogous type containing more elements of reflection, and involving problems and processes of greater benefit to society.

The remedy for the irregularity, pettiness, ill-health, and unserviceableness of modern woman seems to lie, therefore, along educational lines. Not in a general and cultural education alone, but in a special and occupational interest and practice for women, married and unmarried. This should be preferably gainful, though not onerous nor incessant. It should, in fact, be a play-interest, in the sense that the interest of every artist and craftsman, who loves his work and functions through it, is a play-interest. Normal life without normal stimulation is not possible, and the stimulations answering to the nature of the nervous organization seem best supplied by interesting forms of work. This reinstates racially developed stimulations better than anything except play; and interesting work is, psychologically speaking, play.

Some kind of practical activity for women would also relieve the strain on the matrimonial situation—a situation which at present is abnormal and almost impossible. The demands for attention from husbands on the part of wives are greater than is compatible with the absorbing general activities of the latter, and women are not only neglected by the husband in a manner which did not happen in the case of the lover, but they are jealous of men in a more general sense than men are jealous of women. In the absence of other interests they are so dependent on the personal interest that they unconsciously put a jealous construction, not only on personal behavior, but on the most general and indifferent actions of the men with whom their lives are bound up; and this process is so obscure in consciousness that it is usually impossible to determine what the matter really is.

An examination, also, of so-called happy marriages shows very generally that they do not, except for the common interest of children, rest on the true comradeship of like minds, but represent an equilibrium reached through an extension of the maternal interest of the woman to the man, whereby she looks after his personal needs as she does after those of the children—cherishing him, in fact, as a child—or in an extension to woman on the part of the man of that nurture and affection which is in his nature to give to pets and all helpless (and preferably dumb) creatures.

Obviously a more solid basis of association is necessary than either of these two instinctively based compromises; and the practice of an occupational activity of her own choosing by woman, and a generous attitude toward this on the part of man, would contribute to relieve the strain and to make marriage more frequently successful.

THE MIND OF WOMAN AND THE LOWER RACES

I

The mind is a very wonderful thing, but it is questionable whether it is more wonderful than some of the instinctive modes of behavior of lower forms of life. If mind is viewed as an adjustment to external conditions for the purpose of securing control, the human mind is no more wonderful in its way than the homing and migratory instincts of birds; the tropic quality of the male butterfly which leads it to the female though she is imprisoned in a cigar-box in a dark room; or the peculiar sensitivity of the bat which enables it, though blinded, to thread its way through a maze of obstructions hung about a room.

The fact of sensitivity, in short, or the quality of response to stimulation, is more wonderful than its particular formulation in the human brain. Mind simply represents a special development of the quality of sensitivity common to organic nature, and analogous to the sensitivity of the photographic plate. The brain receives impressions, records them, remembers them, compares new experiences with old, and modifies behavior, in the presence of a new or recurrent stimulation, in view of the pleasure-pain connotation of similar situations in the past.

In very low forms of life, as is well known, there is no development of brain or special organs of sense; but the organism is pushed and pulled about by light, heat, gravity, and acid and other chemical forces, and is unable to decline to act on any stimulus reaching it. It reacts in certain characteristic, habitual, and adequate ways, because it responds uniformly to the same stimulation; but it has no choice, and is controlled by the environment. The object of brain development is to reverse these conditions and control the actions of the organism, and of the outside world as well, from within. With the development of the special organs of sense, memory, and consequent ability to compare present experiences with past, with inhibition or the ability to decline to act on a stimulus, and, finally, with abstraction or the power of separating general from particular aspects, we have a condition where the organism sits still, as it were, and picks and chooses its reactions to the outer world; and, by working in certain lines to the exclusion of others, it gains in its turn control of the environment, and begins to reshape it.

All the higher animals possess in some degree the powers of memory, judgment, and choice; but in man nature followed the plan of developing enormously the memory, on which depend abstraction, or the power of general ideas, and the reason. In order to secure this result, the brain, or surface for recording experience, was developed out of all proportion with the body. In the average European the brain weighs about 1,360 grams, or 3 per cent. of the body weight, while the average brain weight of some of the great anthropoid apes is only about 360 grams, or, in the orangoutang, one-half of 1 per cent. of the body weight. In point of fact, nature seems to have reached the limit of her materials in creating the human species. The development of hands freed from locomotion and a brain out of proportion to bodily weight are tours de force, and, so to speak, an afterthought, which put the heaviest strain possible on the materials employed, and even diverted some organs from their original design. A number of ailments like hernia, appendicitis, and uterine displacement, are due to the fact that the erect posture assumed when the hands were diverted from locomotion to prehensile uses put a strain not originally contemplated on certain tissues and organs. Similarly, the proportion of idiocy and insanity in the human species shows that nature had reached the limit of elasticity in her materials and began to take great risks. The brain is a delicate and elaborate organ on the structural side, and in these cases it is not put together properly, or it gets hopelessly out of order. This strain on the materials is evident in all races and in both sexes, and indicates that the same general structural ground-pattern has been followed in all members of the species.

Viewed from the standpoint of brain weight, all races are, broadly speaking, in the same class. For while the relatively small series of brains from the black race examined by anthropologists shows a slight inferiority in weight—about 45 grams in negroes—when compared with white brains, the yellow race shows more than a corresponding superiority to the white; in the Chinese about 70 grams. There is also apparently no superiority in brain weight in modern over ancient times. The cranial capacity of Europeans between the eleventh and eighteenth centuries, as shown by the cemeteries of Paris, is not appreciably different from that of Frenchmen of today, and the Egyptian mummies show larger cranial capacity than the modern Egyptians. Furthermore, the limits of variation between individuals in the same race are wider than the average difference between races. In a series of 500 white brains, the lowest and highest brains will differ, in fact, as much as 650 grams in weight.

There is also no ground for the assumption that the brain of woman is inferior to that of man; for, while the average brain of woman is smaller, the average body weight is also smaller, and it is open to question whether the average brain weight of woman is smaller in proportion to body weight.²⁵⁷ The importance of brain weight in relation to intelligence, moreover, has usually been much exaggerated by anthropologists; for intelligence depends on the rapidity and range of the acts of associative memory, and this in turn on the complexity of the neural processes. Brains are, in fact, like timepieces in this respect, that the small ones work "excellent well" if they are good material and well put together. Although brains occasionally run above 2,000 grams in weight (that of the Russian novelist Turgenieff weighed 2,012), the brains of many eminent men are not distinguished for their great size. That of the French statesman Gambetta weighed only 1,160 grams. It must be borne in mind also that there are many individuals among the lower races and among women having brain weight much in excess of that of that of the average male white.

Of all the possible ways of treating the brain for the purpose of testing its intelligence, that of weighing is the least satisfactory, and has been most indefatigably practiced. A better method, that of counting the nerve cells, has been lately introduced, but to treat a single brain in this way is a work of years, and no series of results exists. In the meantime Miss Thompson, in co-operation with Professor Angell, has completed a study of the mental traits of men and women on what is perhaps the best available principle—that of a series of laboratory tests which eliminate or take into consideration differences due to the characteristic habits of the two sexes. Her findings are probably the most important contribution in this field, and her general conclusion on differences of sex will, I think, hold also for differences of race:

The point to be emphasized as the outcome of this study is that, according to our present light, the psychological differences of sex seem to be largely due, not to difference of average capacity, nor to difference in type of mental activity, but to differences in the social influences brought to bear on the developing individual from early infancy to adult years. The question of the future development of the intellectual life of women is one of social necessities and ideals rather than of the inborn psychological characteristics of sex.²⁵⁸

There is certainly great difference in the mental ability of individuals, and there are probably less marked differences in the average ability of different races; but difference in natural ability is, in the main, a characteristic of the individual, not of race or of sex. It is probable that brain efficiency (speaking from the biological standpoint) has been, on the average, approximately the same in all races and in both sexes since nature first made up a good working-model, and that differences in intellectual expression are mainly social rather than biological, dependent on the fact that different stages of culture present different experiences to the mind, and adventitious circumstances direct the attention to different fields of interest.

II

In approaching the question of the parity or disparity of the mental ability of the white and the lower races, we bring to it a fixed and instinctive prejudice. No race views another race with that generosity with which it views itself. It may even be said that the existence of a social group depends on its taking an exaggerated view of its own importance; and in a state of nature, at least, the same is true of the individual. If self-preservation is the first law of nature, there must be on the mental side an acute consciousness of self, and a habit of regarding the self as of more importance than the world at large. The value of this standpoint lies in the fact that, while a wholesome fear of the enemy is important, a wholesome contempt is even more so. Praising one's self and dispraising an antagonist creates a confidence and a mental superiority in the way of confidence. The vituperative recriminations of modern prize-fighters, the boastings of the Homeric heroes, and the bôgan of the old Germans, like the back-talk of the small boy, were calculated to screw the courage up; and the Indians of America usually gave a dance before going on the war-path, in which by pantomime and boasting they magnified themselves and their past, and so stimulated their self-esteem that they felt invincible. In race-prejudice we see the same tendency to exalt the self and the group at the expense of outsiders. The alien group is belittled by attaching contempt to its peculiarities and habits—its color, speech, dress, and all the signs of its personality. This is not a laudable attitude, but it has been valuable to the group, because a bitter and contemptuous feeling is an aid to good fighting.

No race or nation has yet freed itself from this tendency to exalt and idealize itself. It is very difficult for a member of western civilization to understand that the orientals regard us with a contempt in comparison with which our contempt for them is feeble. Our bloodiness, our newness, our lack of reverence, our land-greed, our break-neck speed and lack of appreciation of leisure make Vandals of us. On the other hand, we are very stupid about recognizing the intelligence of orientals. We have been accustomed to think that there is a great gulf between ourselves and other races; and this persists in an undefinable way after scores of Japanese have taken high rank in our schools, and after Hindus have repeatedly been among the wranglers in mathematics at Cambridge. It is only when one of the far eastern nations has come bodily to the front that we begin to ask ourselves whether there is not an error in our reckoning.

The instinct to belittle outsiders is perhaps at the bottom of our delusion that the white race has one order of mind and the black and yellow races have another. But, while a prejudice—a matter of instinct and emotion—may well be at the beginning of an error of this kind, it could not sustain itself in the face of our logical habits unless reinforced by an error of the judgment. And this error is found in the fact that in a naïve way we assume that our steps in progress from time to time are due to our mental superiority as a race over other races, and to the mental superiority of one generation of ourselves over the preceding.

In this we are confusing advance in culture with brain improvement. If we should assume a certain grade of intelligence, fixed and invariable in all individuals, races, and times—an unwarranted assumption, of course—progress would still be possible, provided we assumed a characteristically human grade of intelligence to begin with. With associative memory, abstraction, and speech men are able to compare the present with the past, to deliberate and discuss, to invent, to abandon old processes for new, to focus attention on special problems, to encourage specialization, and to transmit to the younger generation a more intelligent standpoint and a more advanced starting-point. Culture is the accumulation of the results of activity, and culture could go on improving for a certain time even if there were a retrogression in intelligence. If all the chemists in class A should stop work tomorrow, the chemists in class B would still make discoveries. These would influence manufacture, and progress would result. If a worker in any specialty acquaints himself with the results of his predecessors and contemporaries and works, he will add some results to the sum of knowledge in his line. And if a race preserves by record or tradition the memory of what past generations have done, and adds a little, progress is secured whether the brain improves or stands still. In the same way, the fact that one race has advanced farther in culture than another does not necessarily imply a different order of brain, but may be due to the fact that in the one case social arrangements have not taken the shape affording the most favorable conditions for the operation of the mind.

If, then, we make due allowance for our instinctive tendency as a white group to disparage outsiders, and, on the other hand, for our tendency to confuse progress in culture and general intelligence with biological modification of the brain, we shall have to reduce very much our usual estimate of the difference in mental capacity between ourselves and the lower races, if we do not eliminate it altogether; and we shall perhaps have to abandon altogether the view that there has been an increase in the mental capacity of the white race since prehistoric times.

The first question arising in this connection is whether any of the characteristic faculties of the human mind—perception, memory, inhibition, abstraction—are absent or noticeably weak in the lower races. If this is found to be true, we have reason to attribute the superiority of the white race to biological causes; otherwise we shall have to seek an explanation of white superiority in causes lying outside the brain.

In examining this question we need not dwell on the acuteness of the sense-perceptions, because these are not distinctively human. As a matter of fact, they are usually better developed in animals and in the lower races than in the civilized, because the lower mental life is more perceptive than ratiocinative. The memory of the lower races is also apparently quite as good as that of the higher. The memory of the Australian native or the Eskimo is quite as good as that of our "oldest inhabitant;" and probably no one would claim that the modern scientist has a better memory than the bard of the Homeric period.

There is, however, a prevalent view, for the popularization of which Herbert Spencer is largely responsible, that primitive man has feeble powers of inhibition. Like the equally erroneous view that early man is a free and unfettered creature, it arises from our habit of assuming that, because his inhibitions and unfreedom do not correspond with our own restraints, they do not exist. Sir John Lubbock pointed out long ago that the savage is hedged about by conventions so minute and so mandatory that he is actually the least free person in the world. But, in spite of this, Spencer and others have insisted that he is incapable of self-restraint, is carried away like a child by the impulse of the moment, and is incapable of rejecting an immediate gratification for a greater future one. Cases like the one mentioned by Darwin of the Fuegian who struck and killed his little son when the latter dropped a basket of fish into the water are cited without regard to the fact that cases of sudden domestic violence and quick repentance are common in any city today; and the failure of the Australian blacks to throw back the small fry when seining is referred to without pausing to consider that our practice of exterminating game and denuding our forests shows an amazing lack of individual self-restraint.

The truth is that the restraints exercised in a group depend largely on the traditions, views, and teachings of the group, and, if we have this in mind, the savage cannot be called deficient on the side of inhibition. It is doubtful if modern society affords anything more striking in the way of inhibition than is found in connection with taboo, fetish, totemism, and ceremonial among the lower races. In the great majority of the American Indian and Australian tribes a man is strictly forbidden to kill or eat the animals whose name his clan bears as a totem. The central Australian may not, in addition, eat the flesh of any animal killed or even touched by persons standing in certain relations of kinship to him. At certain times also he is forbidden to eat the flesh of a number of animals and at all times he must share all food secured with the tribal elders and some others.

A native of Queensland will put his mark on an unripe zamia fruit, and may be sure that it will be untouched and that when it is ripe he has only to go and get it. The Eskimos, though starving, will not molest the sacred seal basking before their huts. Similarly in social intercourse the inhibitions are numerous. To some of his sisters, blood and tribal, the Australian may not speak at all; to others only at certain distances, according to the degree of kinship. The west African fetish acts as a police, and property protected by it is safer than under civilized laws. Food and palm wine are placed beside the path with a piece of fetish suspended near by, and no one will touch them without leaving the proper payment. The garden of a native may be a mile from the house, unfenced, and sometimes unvisited for weeks by the owner; but it is immune from depredations if protected by fetish. Our proverb says, "A hungry belly has no ears," and it must be admitted that the inhibition of food impulses implies no small power of restraint.

Altogether too much has been made of inhibition, anyway, as a sign of mentality, for it is not even characteristic of the human species. The well-trained dog inhibits in the presence of the most enticing stimulations of the kitchen. And it is also true that one race, at least—the American Indian—makes inhibition of the most conspicuous feature in its system of education. From the time the ice is broken to give him a cold plunge and begin the toughening process on the day of his birth, until he dies with out a groan under torture the Indian is schooled in the restraint of his impulses. He does not, indeed, practice our identical restraints, because his traditions and the run of his attention are different; but he has a capacity for controlling impulse equal to our own.

Another serious charge against the intelligence of the lower races is lack of the power of abstraction. They certainly do not deal largely in abstraction, and their languages are poor in abstract terms. But there is a great difference between the habit of thinking in abstract terms and the ability to do so.

The degree to which abstraction is employed in the activities of a group depends on the complexity of the activities and on the complexity of consciousness in the group. When science, philosophy, and logic, and systems of reckoning time, space, and number are taught in the schools; when the attention is not so much engaged in perceptual as in deliberate acts; and when thought is a profession, then abstract modes of thought are forced on the mind. This does not argue absence of the power of abstraction in the lower races, or even a low grade of ability, but lack of practice. To one skilled in any line an unpracticed person seems very stupid; and this is apparently the reason why travelers report that the black and yellow races have feeble powers of abstraction. It is generally admitted, however, that the use of speech involves the power of abstraction, so that all races have the power in some degree. When we come further to examine the degree in which they possess it, we find that they compare favorably with ourselves in any test which involves a fair comparison.

The proverb is a form of abstraction practiced by all races, and is perhaps the best test of the natural bent of the mind in this direction, because, like ballad poetry, and slang, proverbial sayings do not originate with the educated class, but are of popular origin. At the same time, proverbs compare favorably with the mots of literature, and many proverbs have, in fact, drifted into literature and become connected with the names of great writers. Indeed, the saying that there is nothing new under the sun applies with such force and fidelity to literature that, if we should strip Hesiod and Homer and Chaucer of such phrases as "The half is greater than the whole," "It is a wise son that knows his own father" (which Shakespeare quotes the other end about), and "To make a virtue of necessity," and if we should further eliminate from literature the motives and sentiments also in ballad poetry and in popular thought, little would remain but form.

If we assume, then, that the popular mind—let us say the peasant mind—in the white race is as capable of abstraction as the mind of the higher classes, but not so specialized in this direction—and no one can doubt this in view of the academic record of country-bred boys—the following comparison of our proverbs with those of the Africans of the Guinea coast (the latter reported by the late Sir A.B. Ellis²⁵⁹) is significant:

On the side of number we have another test of the power of abstraction; and while the lower races show lack of practice in this, they show no lack of power. It is true that tribes have been found with no names for numbers beyond two, three, or five; but these are isolated groups, like the Veddahs and Bushmen, who have no trade or commerce, and lead a miserable existence, with little or nothing to count. The directions of attention and the simplicity or complexity of mental processes depend on the character of the external situation which the mind has to manipulate. If the activities are simple, the mind is simple, and if the activities were nil, the mind would be nil. The mind is nothing but a means of manipulating the outside world. Number, time, and space conceptions and systems become more complex and accurate, not as the human mind grows in capacity, but as activities become more varied and call for more extended and accurate systems of notation and measurement. Trade and commerce, machinery and manufacture, and all the processes of civilization involve specialization in the apprehension of series as such. Under these conditions the number technique becomes elaborate and requires time and instruction for its mastery. The advance which mathematics has made within a brief historical time is strikingly illustrated by the words with which the celebrated mathematician, Sir Henry Savile, who died in 1662, closed his career as a professor at Oxford:

By the grace of God, gentlemen hearers, I have performed my promise. I have redeemed my pledge. I have explained, according to my ability, the definitions, postulates, axioms, and the first eight propositions of the Elements of Euclid. Here, sinking under the weight of years, I lay down my art and my instruments.²⁶⁰

From the standpoint of modern mathematics, Sir Henry Savile and the Bushman are both woefully backward; and in both cases the backwardness is not a matter of mental incapacity, but of the state of the science.

In respect, then, to brain structure and the more important mental faculties we find that no race is radically unlike the others. Still, it might happen that the mental activities and products of two groups were so different as to place them in different classes. But precisely the contrary is true. There is in force a principle called the law of parallelism in development, according to which any group takes much the same steps in development as any other. The group may be belated, indeed, and not reach certain stages, but the ground patterns of life are the same in the lower races and in the higher. Mechanical inventions, textile industries, rude painting, poetry, sculpture, and song, marriage and family life, organization under leaders, belief in spirits, a mythology, and some form of church and state exist universally. At one time students of mankind, when they found a myth in Hawaii corresponding to the Greek story of Orpheus and Eurydice, or an Aztec poem of tender longing in absence, or a story of the deluge, were wont to conjecture how these could have been carried over from Greek or Elizabethan or Hebraic sources, or whether they did not afford evidence of a time when all branches of the human race dwelt together with a common fund of sentiment and tradition. But this standpoint has been abandoned, and it is recognized that the human mind and the outside world are essentially alike the world over; that the mind everywhere acts on the same principles; and that, ignoring the local, incidental, and eccentric, we find similar laws of growth among all peoples.

The number of things which can stimulate the human mind is somewhat definite and limited. Among them, for example, is death. This happens everywhere, and the death of a dear one may cause the living to imagine ways of being reunited. The story of Orpheus and Eurydice may thus arise spontaneously and perpetually, wherever death and affection exist. Or, there may be a separation from home and friends, and the mind runs back in distress and longing over the happy past, and the state of consciousness aroused is as definite a fact among savages as among the civilized. A beautiful passage in Homer represents Helen looking out on the Greeks from the wall of Troy and saying:

And now behold I all the other glancing-eyed Achaians, whom well I could discern and tell their names; but two captains of the host can I not see, even Kastor tamer of horses and Polydukes the skilful boxer, mine own brethren whom the same mother bare. Either they came not in the company from lovely Lakedaimon; or they came hither indeed in their seafaring ships, but now will not enter into the battle of the warriors, for fear of the many scornings and revilings that are mine.²⁶¹

When this passage is thus stripped of its technical excellence by a prose translation, we may compare it with the following New Zealand lament composed by a young woman who was captured on the island of Tuhua and carried to a mountain from which she could see her home: