Why should grief
or anxiety cause the central fasciae alone of the frontal muscle
together with those round the eyes, to contract? Here we seem
to have a complex movement for the sole purpose of expressing grief;
and yet it is a comparatively rare expression, and often overlooked.
I believe the explanation is not so difficult as it at first appears.
Dr. Duchenne gives a photograph of the young man before referred to,
who, when looking upwards at a strongly illuminated surface,
involuntarily contracted his grief-muscles in an exaggerated manner.
I had entirely forgotten this photograph, when on a very bright
day with the sun behind me, I met, whilst on horseback, a girl
whose eyebrows, as she looked up at me, became extremely oblique,
with the proper furrows on her forehead. I have observed the same
movement under similar circumstances on several subsequent occasions.
On my return home I made three of my children, without giving them
any clue to my object, look as long and as attentively as they could,
at the summit of a tall tree standing against an extremely bright sky.
With all three, the orbicular, corrugator, and pyramidal muscles were
energetically contracted, through reflex action, from the excitement of
the retina, so that their eyes might be protected from the bright light.
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