Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 4.djvu/578

560 accused of having committed a crime, and who knows that he has committed it, is alarmed at the sight of the judge who questions him, and at the thought of the accusation which stands against him, even though the crime was committed in a moment of delirium. On the other hand, it may easily happen that a hardened malefactor, who has committed a crime with full deliberation, will be so far master of himself as to feel but insignificant emotion when the circumstances of his crime are brought up before him. Yet this idea of M. Cyon's merits the attention of psychological physiologists, and we may venture to hope that the day will come when treatises on psychology will conclude their descriptions of passional states with graphic tracings showing the rhythm of heart-contractions which answers to each passion. These tracings will be trustworthy and precise, for, if the will be mistress of movements and demonstrations that appear at the surface, it has but very little power over viscera that are concealed, like the heart, and these are truthful witnesses, ever at hand to rectify lying testimony.

But we must bear in mind that muscles which are subject to the will are not always employed to dissemble passion, but that very often, by their almost automatic attitude, they betray the real state of the feelings. In vain would a man in a furious passion strive to stand still. All his members are agitated with violent movements. Astonishment produces a relaxation of the muscles, and hence the French phrase, les bras tombent (the arms fall), to denote the effects of this emotion. Fear causes one's legs to fail him; one is said to he petrified by fear. But there are none of the muscles that are so influenced, so modified by the passions, as those of the face. The physiognomy is indeed a betrayer of the soul's inner states. "When the soul is agitated," says Buffon, "the face becomes a living picture, wherein the passions are given with equal delicacy and force; where every movement of the soul is expressed by a dash of the pencil, and each act by a character, the rapid, living impress of which outstrips the will, thus unveiling and manifesting, by passionate signs, our most secret emotions."

It seems impossible to subject to physiological analysis appearances so complex, so varied, and so fickle. And yet an accomplished experimenter has recently succeeded in partially ordering this chaos, and in precisely determining the muscular mechanism of the human physiognomy as related to the various passions. Having first ascertained, by minute dissections, the position and separate function of the numerous muscles situate between the skin and the facial bones, and having learned how the nerve-filaments of the seventh pair (the facial nerves) are distributed through these muscles and animate them, M. Duchenne, of Boulogne, has determined, by means of the electric current, or of