These may consist of movements of any part of the body,
as the wagging of a dog's tail, the shrugging of a man's shoulders,
the erection of the hair, the exudation of perspiration,
the state of the capillary circulation, laboured breathing,
and the use of the vocal or other sound-producing instruments.
Even insects express anger, terror, jealousy, and love
by their stridulation. With man the respiratory organs are
of especial importance in expression, not only in a direct,
but in a still higher degree in an indirect manner.
Few points are more interesting in our present subject
than the extraordinarily complex chain of events which lead
to certain expressive movements. Take, for instance,
the oblique eyebrows of a man suffering from grief or anxiety.
When infants scream loudly from hunger or pain, the circulation
is affected, and the eyes tend to become gorged with blood:
consequently the muscles surrounding the eyes are strongly
contracted as a protection: this action, in the course
of many generations, has become firmly fixed and inherited:
but when, with advancing years and culture, the habit of
screaming is partially repressed, the muscles round the eyes
still tend to contract, whenever even slight distress is felt:
of these muscles, the pyramidals of the nose are less under the control
of the will than are the others and their contraction can be
checked only by that of the central fasciae of the frontal muscle:
these latter fasciae draw up the inner ends of the eyebrows,
and wrinkle the forehead in a peculiar manner, which we
instantly recognize as the expression of grief or anxiety.
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