Charles Darwin's Works Volume 10 (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1896 edition. Excerpt: ...by a dog, and when I asked her what was the matter, she stopped whimpering, and her eyebrows instantly became oblique to an extraordinary degree. 1 Me'canlsme ile la Phys. Humaine, Album, p. 15. Here then, as I cannot doubt, wo have the key to the problem why the central fasciae of the frontal muscle and the muscles round the eyes contract in opposition to each other under the influence of grief;--whether their contraction be prolonged, as with the melancholic insane, or momentary, from some trifling cause of distress. We have all of us, as infants, repeatedly contracted our orbicular, corrugator, and pyramidal muscles, in order to protect our eyes whilst screaming; our progenitors before us have done the same during many generations; and though with advancing years we easily prevent, when feeling distressed, the utterance of screams, we cannot from long habit always prevent a slight contraction of the above-named muscles; nor indeed do we observe their contraction in ourselves, or attempt to stop it, if slight. But the pyramidal muscles seem to be less under the command of the will than the other related muscles; and if they be well developed, their contraction can be checked only by the antagonistic contraction of the central fasciae of the frontal muscle. The result which necessarily follows, if these fasciae contract energetically, is the oblique drawing up of the eyebrows, the puckering of their inner ends, and the formation of rectangular furrows on the middle of the forehead. As children and women cry much more freely than men, and as grown-np persons of both sexes rarely weep except from mental distress, we can understand why the grief-muscles are more frequently seen in action, as I believe to be the case, with children and women...