Excerpt from The Journal of American Folk-Lore, Vol. 14

We will first devote our attention to the question, Do differences exist in the organization of the human mind ? Since Waitz's thorough discussion of the question of the unity of the human species, there can be no doubt that in the main the mental characteristics of man are the same all over the world; but the question remains open, whether there is a sufficient difference in grade to allow us to assume that the present races of man may be considered as standing on different stages of the evolutionary series, whether we are justified in ascribing to civilized man a higher place in organization than to primitive man. In answering this question, we must clearly distinguish between the influences of civilization and of race. A number of anatomical facts point to the conclusion that the races of Africa, Australia, and Melanesia are to a certain extent inferior to the races of Asia, America, and Europe. We find that on the average the size of the brain of the negroid races is less than the size of the brain of the other races; and the difference in favor of the mongoloid and white races is so great that we are justified in assuming a certain correlation between their mental ability and the increased size of their brain. At the same time it must be borne in mind that the variability of the mongoloid and white races on the one hand, and of the negroid races on the other, is so great that only a small number, comparatively speaking, of individuals belonging to the latter have brains smaller than any brains found among the former; and that, on the other hand, only a few individuals of the mongoloid races have brains so large that they would not occur at all among the black races. That is to say, the bulk of the two groups of races have brains of the same capacities, but individuals with heavy brains are proportionately more frequent among the mongoloid and white races than among the negroid races. Probably this difference in the size of the brain is accompanied by differences in structure, although no satisfactory information on this point is available. On the other hand, if we compare civilized people of any race with uncivilized people of the same race, we do not find any anatomical differences which would justify us in assuming any fundamental differences in mental constitution.

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