502 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



associated, such, unlikes being kept together for longer or shorter 

 periods, the resistances which arise operate as a power tending to 

 assimilate them. This process of assimilation is manifested in all 

 degrees of our intercourse with others. Men rarely come into 

 contact with each other, even for special and temporary ends, 

 without feeling the molding influence of more or less unlike 

 habits, manners, opinions, and speech. Unless our ways of think- 

 ing, acting, and speaking are so firmly established as to be 

 unchangeable, we can not long remain in the society of others 

 without feeling that the differences which separate us from them 

 are gradually being worn down, if not disappearing altogether : 

 strenuous as our determination may be, Nature herself seeks to 

 lessen resistance, and thus guides us insensibly into the path 

 which offers the least. Thus it is (in indifferent things, at any 

 rate) that we gain our opinions and beliefs from those about us, 

 that we unconsciously acquire the gestures and mannerisms of 

 relatives and friends that, in a word, we come at last to be pro- 

 foundly modified by the more permanent characters of our human 

 surrounding. In speech alone the change wrought is often con- 

 siderable. Few succeed in avoiding the use of colloquialisms 

 constantly heard, and fewer still escape the insidious influence of 

 phrases and idioms peculiar to districts and countries: new- 

 comers may at first regard them as strange, even barbarous, yet 

 in the end they employ the novel forms as frequently and as un- 

 consciously as the native. The very features of human be- 

 ings living in close association with each other are known to 

 undergo assimilation. The fact, again, that jockeys, hostlers, and 

 cowherds sometimes betray more or less distant resemblances to 

 the animals with which they habitually associate is well known ; 

 and although animals do not in feature grow to be like human 

 beings by contact with them, it is certain that in the character of 

 intelligence, as in the case of the dog and the cat, as well as in 

 tameness generally, as in the case of cattle and poultry, a real and 

 profound assimilation of them to men has undoubtedly taken 

 place. 



Fashion in all its forms illustrates the same assimilative pro- 

 cess. The first fashions are seen under the domestic roof : there, 

 children imitate their parents not only in speech, gesture, and 

 action, but also sometimes in opinion and bent of mind, and (for 

 the sons, at any rate) occasionally also in vocation. Men imitate 

 individuals as well as communities ; they borrow from each other 

 mannerisms of dress, of conduct, of opinion, and even of literary 

 style, whenever attention is strongly called to any of these ; even 

 maladies have been known to become fashionable. A remarkable 

 exploit in athletics usually sends a fever of emulation through 

 the sympathetic members of a social group, just as a fashion set 



