found that we are holding him to account
for not being able to persist in courses of action which do not
seem to him, with his training and education, worth persisting
in, and for not conforming to standards which, given his
background, are meaningless.

[Footnote 2: _Ibid_. p. 108.]

But if differences in racial attainments are due to differences
in environment, it might be said that this itself is testimony
to the superiority of the race that has the more complex
and exacting environment. This is not by any means clearly
the case. The "culture" or civilization which a race exhibits
is a very uncertain index of its gifts or its capacities. The
culture found in a race is, it may be said without exaggeration,
largely a matter of accident or circumstance rather than
of heredity.

Some of the environmental causes for differences in culture
may he explicitly noted. Any modern culture is the result
of interminglings of many different cross-streams and cross-borrowings.
Races that have long been isolated as, for example
the African negroes, have no possibility of picking up
all the acquisitions to which races that intermingle have
access. Progress in the developments of arts, sciences, and
institutions depends on fortunate individual variations. The
smaller the race the less the number of variations possible,
including those on the side of what we call genius. Again
fortunate variations depend not so much on the general average
intellectual capacities of the race as on its variability.
So one race may possess a relative superiority of achievement
because of its high variability, just as, as we have already
pointed out, the greater preeminence of the male sex with
regard to intellectual accomplishment is due to the greater
number of variations both above and below the norm which
it displays. The reasons for variability are again, according
to Professor Boas, largely environmental. "We have seen,
when a people is descended from a small uniform group, that
then its variability will decrease; while on the other hand,
when a group has a much-varied origin or when the ancestors
belong to entirely distinct types the variability may be
considerably increased."[1]

[Footnote 1: Boas; _loc. cit._, p. 93.]

Again a race may be placed in such geographical conditions
that a fortuitous variation on the part of one individual may
prove of enormous value in the development of its civilization.
Or fortunate geographical conditions