ACTION PATTERNS 309 



upon its brain by contact with its immediate family 

 environment, are permanent. Thus language, cus- 

 tom, religion, conduct and the conventions of races 

 and peoples are transmitted through the generations. 

 On the other hand, if a newborn Puritan babe, 

 whose plastic brain has received no action pat- 

 terns, were to be placed in the arms of a Pata- 

 gonian Indian, its brain would receive and record 

 the Patagonian language, customs and religion 

 and no other; and if that transplanted child re- 

 mained until middle life exclusively in the new environ- 

 ment, no influence could take from that brain all the 

 action patterns derived from that environment, though 

 other action patterns might be superimposed. 



The Hindoo, Chinaman, Brahmin, Teuton, Briton, 

 Bushman, Christian or Pagan has acquired brain 

 patterns which are ready-made by the environment 

 into which he has been born and in the midst of which 

 he has been reared ; and not until the stronger stimulus 

 of the necessity of race preservation intervenes will 

 the old conventions, customs and languages give way 

 to the new. 



The plasticity of the brain may be observed on a 

 large scale in the results obtained in the schools of a 

 cosmopolitan city like New York, where the children 

 of immigrants, drawn from all quarters of the globe 

 from Iceland to Australia, are subjected to similar 

 educational influences. The mass in the "melting 

 pot," as it has aptly been termed, rapidly approaches 

 a semblance of homogeneity, not alone in mental and 

 moral characteristics but even in facial characteristics, 

 as has been shown by students of physiognomy. 



