Page:The Galaxy, Volume 6.djvu/204

184 which still more marked cardiac disturbance is due to the anxiety produced by vast and uncertain speculations in stocks.

With the secreting glands the effects of emotion are also very distinctly shown. The sight or smell of food, nay, even the very thought of it, makes the "mouth water," and sometimes acts with such force as to cause the saliva to be ejected in a stream from between the lips. Other emotions arrest the secretion of saliva, or entirely change its character. Most individuals have noticed in their own persons how the mouth and throat became parched through anxiety, or nervousness, as it is called. A young man making his first public speech always requires a liberal supply of water to quench his emotional thirst, and some speakers never break themselves of the habit. Every one, too, who reads novels, has come across a hero who "spoke in a voice husky with emotion," but who was able by the strong will with which he was endowed to conceal all other evidence of the passion which was rending his heart. The influence of emotion over this secretion is made use of in India as a means of discovering a thief among the servants of a family. All those who are suspected being compelled to hold a certain quantity of rice in the mouth during a few minutes, the offender is generally distinguished by the comparative dryness of his mouthful at the end of the experiment. Such a test must, however, often lead to erroneous conclusions, for it would very frequently be the case that a timid and nervous person would be so frightened as to suffer an arrest of the secretion of the saliva, while the bold and hardened individual would experience no emotional disturbance, and, consequently, no change in the natural moisture of his mouth.

Some writers have supposed that the saliva of a hydrophobic dog is only the natural secretion altered by emotional disturbance, and cases are on record of angry animals causing hydrophobia by their bites, when they themselves have never exhibited any signs of the disease. It is also tolerably certain that the saliva of an angry man or woman is sometimes possessed of poisonous properties, and that death has resulted from its being introduced into the blood of other persons. It has also been supposed that the saliva of the rattlesnake, copperhead, cobra, and other serpents, is only venomous when the reptiles are enraged. This, however, is an erroneous idea, as the writer has repeatedly proven, so far as the poison of the first-named of these snakes is concerned.

But that the saliva of an enraged man or woman may, in certain cases, become poisonous, is no unphysiological idea. The effects of strong emotions upon the milk of a nursing woman have long been noticed by physicians, and many infants have become affected with serious diseases, or have suddenly died from the milk secreted under such circumstances. Grief, anxiety, fretfulness, fear, and fits of anger tend to make the milk thin, and otherwise to alter its normal composition. A striking case, showing the effect of strong mental emotion upon the milk, is related by an eminent German physician, and is generally referred to in treatises on physiology. A carpenter fell into a quarrel with a soldier billeted in his house, and was set upon by the latter with his drawn sword. The wife of the carpenter at first trembled with fear and terror, and then, suddenly throwing herself furiously between the combatants, wrested the sword from the soldier's hand, broke it in pieces, and threw it away. During the tumult, some neighbors came in and separated the men. While in this state of