We must remember that the European peasant grows up in a (more or less) civilized environment; he learns a (more or less) well-developed and written language, which serves as an easier instrument and a stronger inducement for abstract thought; he is born into a (more or less) advanced religion. All these advantages and the advantage of a more complex education the European peasant owes to his superiors in ability and civilization. Rob the peasant of these opportunities, plunge him into the social environment of present primitive man, and what difference in thinking power will be left between them? The answer to this question brings me to the second point of difference which I have mentioned--the difference in variability. I have already alluded to the divergencies in temperament to be found among the members of every primitive community. But well marked as are these and other individual differences, I suspect that they are less prominent among primitive than among more advanced peoples. This difference in variability, if really existent, is probably the outcome of more frequent racial admixture and more complex social environment in civilized communities. In another sense, the variability of the savage is indicated by the comparative data afforded by certain psychological investigations. A civilized community may not differ much from a primitive one in the mean or average of a given character, but the extreme deviations which it shows from that mean will be more numerous and more pronounced. This kind of variability has probably another source. The members of a primitive community behave toward the applied test in the simplest manner, by the use of a mental process which we will call A, whereas those of a more advanced civilization employ other mental processes, in addition to A, say B, C, D, or E, each individual using them in different degrees for the performance of one and the same test. Finally, there is in all likelihood a third kind of variability, whose origin is ultimately environmental, which is manifested by extremes of nervous instability. Probably the exceptionally defective and the exceptional genius are more common among civilized than among primitive peoples. Similar features undoubtedly meet us in the study of sexual differences. The average results of various tests of mental ability applied to men and women are not, on the whole, very different for the two sexes, but the men always show considerably greater individual variation than the women. And here, at all events, the relation between the frequency of mental deficiency and genius in the two sexes is unquestionable. Our asylums contain a considerably greater number of males than of females, as a compensation for which genius is decidedly less frequent in females than in males. 7. Individual Differences[64]