Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 71.djvu/262

256 that it is never too late to mend should be replaced by the one that it is ever too late to become what one might have been, if an opportunity has been allowed to slip.

Students should early recognize the importance of making the most of the morning of life. Biologists have come to recognize the economic value of the period of infancy. The period of infancy is the period of plasticity, the period when the individual can be molded and modified; in other words, educated. The longer the period of infancy, the higher the degree of educability. The newly-hatched chick has a short period of infancy. On emerging from the egg, it can perform almost all the activities which it will ever be able to perform. It has very little to learn, very little possibility of learning and very little time in which to learn. The young dog has more to learn, a longer period in which to learn it and larger possibilities of acquiring new activities. The human being has the longest period of infancy. By infancy I do not mean alone the period when the child is in the cradle. Biologically it includes all the period of life from birth to maturity. It is the period of plasticity, the period of educability. After this period, the possibilities of education grow less and less. Perchance there are freshmen who may peruse this. I desire to give you a few words of comfort. You may be frequently derided by the learned sophomores who call you "greenies" or "freshies." Take comfort and regard the appellation "freshmen" as a mark of honor rather than derision. To be fresh or to be green means that you are still growing. All should wish to be green and to grow as long as possible. May you live to a green old age. Even the sophomores are all right. Woodrow Wilson said, "A sophomore is one in whom the sap is rising but it has not yet reached his head. He will eventually mature."

Professor James says that one seldom gets an entirely new idea into his head after thirty. After that period one may erect a splendid structure upon the foundation already laid. But if any subsequent structure is to be reared the proper foundation must have been laid before that time. For "outside of their own business," says James, "the ideas gained by men before they are twenty-five are practically the only ideas they shall have in all their lives." We can not get anything new, for disinterested curiosity is past, instincts have died out, bonds of association have become fixed, "mental grooves and channels set, the power of assimilation gone." Hardly even is a foreign language learned after twenty spoken without a foreign accent. "In most of us, by the age of thirty, the character has set like plaster, and will never soften again." The most possible should be made of early life, for, although it is a fact that the number of cells in a given brain is com-, plete at birth, yet mental exercise must determine the number that becomes fully developed. Moreover, the period for development lies largely between birth and maturity. It is the period when nerve