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We must now briefly consider what may be called the “comparative anthropology” of mind which deals with the various degrees of mental ability displayed by different human races; this subject follows inevitably upon the comparison of the human mind viewed as a single type with the psychological processes of lower animals.  When we reviewed the diverse characteristics of human races—­the protrusion of the jaws, greater or lesser stature, and the like—­it appeared that so-called “lower” races could be distinguished which differed from the “higher” races in the direction of the apes; the question immediately arises whether similar distinctions and relations are discoverable on the basis of mental traits.  But in the present case there are not so many well-substantiated differentia at the disposal of the student, and it does not appear so clearly that the “higher” races are furthest from the lower primates and lower mammalia as regards their mental processes.  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 attainments 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 Mongolian 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 cooperate in building up the conceptions peculiar to the type, and the materials with which the physical mechanism deals, in the way of environmental, educational, and social “grist for the mental mill.”  Many anthropologists accord too great an importance to the third constituent 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 things which the experiences of his earlier life have accustomed him to look for and to find.  This may be granted, and it may also be admitted that children of so-called “lower” races can be educated side by side with the youth of white races without noticeably falling behind, up to a certain point when, at the age of adolescence, in the classic case of the Australian natives, other factors prove to be obstacles to further progress.  We must also recognize that the character of the environment of a race determines to a large extent the mode of life of the people; a forest-dwelling Indian of the interior is a hunter as well as a warrior, while a South Sea Islander is a navigator and a fisherman.