Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 2.djvu/451

Rh that he is far from having established his case, it will be admitted by every reader that he has thrown much new light upon it, and made a most fascinating and instructive book. Mr. Darwin distinguishes between physiognomy and expression. The former is statical, the latter dynamical. Physiognomy aims at the recognition of character through the study of the permanent form of the features. Expression, on the other nand, deals with actions, or the play of features and gesture in man and animals, as constituting the natural language of the feelings. Much has been written upon the subject of Expression by men of various countries, but Mr. Darwin recognizes that Sir Charles Bell, in his "Anatomy and Philosophy of Expression," published in 1806, not only laid the foundations of the subject as a branch of science, but built it up into a noble structure. Mr. Darwin is of opinion that the subject has hitherto been pursued by a false method, or has been vitiated in its treatment by erroneous assumptions. Bell, Gratiolet, Duchenne, and the other leading writers upon the question, have dealt with it on the old hypothesis, that the different animal species came into existence just as they are now, wholly distinct from each other; but Mr. Darwin maintains that, so long as man and all other animals are viewed in this way as independent creations, the true philosophy of the subject cannot be reached. The simple before the complex; the lower forms of life as interpreting the higher, and the whole as a connected scheme of development, is now the method of biology, and for this investigation it is, therefore, necessary to study the manifestations of character in their simplest forms.

An able writer in the Saturday Review summarizes Mr. Darwin's views as follows: "The tendency to draw as broadly as possible the distinction between man and brutes led Sir Charles Bell to deny to the lower animals any expression beyond what might be referred more or less plainly to acts of volition or necessary instincts, their faces seeming to him to be chiefly capable of expressing merely rage or fear. The facial muscles in man he thought to be a special provision for the sole object of expression, and so far distinctive of humanity. But the simple fact that the anthropoid apes possess the same facial muscles that we do, renders it most improbable, apart from any reference to teleology in general, that we were endowed with these muscles for any such purpose, still more that monkeys had special muscles given to them solely for the purpose of exhibiting their hideous grimaces. Since distinct uses can, with much probability, be assigned to almost all the facial muscles, we may look upon expression as but an incidental result of muscular or organic function. Mr. Darwin's early inclination toward the doctrine of evolution, or the origin of man from lower forms, led him five-and-twenty years ago to regard the habit of expressing our feelings by certain movements, innate as it has now become, as having been in some manner gradually acquired at the first. Seeking back for the origin of movements of this kind, he, in the first place, was