passional states of the physiognomy may be resolved into a number of simple movements. And, just as he produces simple passional expressions by artificial means, so, too, he effects the synthesis of the complex expressions. Attention, which is produced by the contraction of the frontal muscle, and joy, which is due to the conjoint activity of the great zygomatic and the inferior orbicular, are primary expressions. Whenever we determine simultaneously on one face the contraction of these two muscles, we get the physiognomy of a person who has a lively impression of some pleasing and unexpected news. If, together with these muscles, we excite that which serves to express lechery-i. e., the transverse nasal muscle-we get the type of attention directed toward some lascivious object. If we associate the lines indicating pleasure with those denoting pain, we recognize at once the melancholy smile. When we combine the sinile (by contracting the great zygomatic) with gentle grief (by contracting the minor zygomatic), or, better still, with a slight contraction of the muscle of suffering-the superciliary— we have an admirable and touching expression of pity and compassion. These fine physiological dissections, and the masterly syntheses they suggested to M. Duchenne, are nearly in full accord, as concerns their results, with the most ancient observations of empiricism, with the intuitions of painters and sculptors, as also with the teaching of psychologists and moralists. Results of this kind add nothing to our knowledge of the body or of the mind, but they will, perhaps, be of service to artists who desire to be exact in the anatomical reproduction of the passional movements of the physiognomy. No doubt the genius of superior artists is a sure and potent instinct, which leads them to follow rules they know not; and it is probable that neither Raffaelle, nor Correggio, nor Titian, would have been a greater painter, had he known, as modern physicists do, the laws of harmony and the simultaneous contrast of colors. Nevertheless, this sure and potent instinct, the germ of which exists in the élite of the artist-world, may be to some extent acquired by laborious study, and hence the conscientious artist will understand all the advantage to be derived from a science which, by giving him precise and certain directions, will save him much preliminary labor and much fruitless experiment. Why is one special muscle of the face affected by pain, another by fear, and a third by anger? In short, why is every passion interpreted in the physiognomy by regular, determinate movements, just as the rhythm of the heart is modified? To give the question a more general form, is there a logical relation between gesture and emotion? This is a difficult question, recently put by Mr. Darwin, and which he strives to answer in accordance with his usual doctrines. For him, instincts are habits originally acquired purposely, voluntarily, and afterward fixed in the race by heredity. The instinctive movements of the physiognomy, considered as passional ex pressions, have the same origin. Thus, the habit of praying with the hands joined palm to palm comes, according to him, from the fact that in past times captives testified their entire submission by holding up their hands to be bound by the victor. The captive assumed the kneeling posture, in order to make this operation easier. Thus, the gesture and the attitude, which are now the instinctive expression of adoration, of devotion, would be merely vestiges of the savage usages of primitive man. When we are angry with a person, we involuntarily close our fists, so that they may be ready for use, even when we have no intention of striking the one who has angered us. If, under the action of similar feelings, the lips contract so as to show the teeth, as though we were preparing to bite, the reason is, says Darwin, that we are descended from animals who used their teeth as weapons of offense. Why do the eyebrows assume an oblique position when a person is suffering pain? For this reason: when children cry from hunger or from pain, the act of crying profoundly modifies the circulation; the blood flows to the head, and particularly to the eyes, and this produces an unpleasant sensation. The muscles around the eyes then contract so as to protect them, and this action has become, under the influence of selection and heredity, an instinctive habit. Most of Mr. Darwin's ingenious explanations thus tend to refer movements of the physiognomy, that are now involuntary and instinctive, to movements that once were voluntary and intentional. Many of these explanations seem plausible, but it is nevertheless true that the physiognomy betrays the emotions and passions by means of signs entirely independent of the will. That some of the muscular movements of the face arose in the manner described by Darwin we might admit, but still we cannot see how that accomplished naturalist can reduce under his fundamental hypothesis those complex movements which are expressed by laughter, lachrymal secretion, blushing, pallor, turgescence or flaccidity of the flesh, and the flashing and dimming of the eyes. All these phenomena are entirely independent of the will, nor can they be explained on the theory put forward by Darwin to account for the eyebrow contracting under the influence of painful emotions, or for the lips contracting in anger. Therefore, we are forced to the conclusion that the agitation of the cephalic centres, produced by the passions, calls forth, in virtue of the anatomical relations of those centres with the facial nerves and muscles, reflex phenomena that never were under the control of the will. The habit of seeing such and such an expression associated with such and such a passion leads us to judge of the one by the other; but yet the habit is not the efficient cause of the expression. There still remains to be considered one more series of physiological phenomena which bear the impress of passion, viz., vocal pheThe inflections of the voice, as related to the passions, are as varied as the expressions of the physiognomy. Each passion has its nomena. own language, its own tones, its own note, just as it has its own nerve and its own muscle. Physiological analysis, however, is far more difficult here than in the case of the physiognomy. How shall we analyze the complex mechanisms that cause the lungs and the larynx to produce the various sounds of moaning, crying, groaning, sobbing, and sighing? We are acquainted with the ensemble of muscular functions which give rise to these different expressions of the soul's states, but why does laughter express gayety, and sighing express sadness? We cannot tell. To sum up a profound disturbance of the circulatory and respiratory acts; a more or less violent agitation of the members; changes of the attitude of the body; diversified movements in the physiognomy; infinitely-varied inflections and modulations of the voice-all these phenomena are the consequence of what takes place in the brain when that organ receives impressions of such a nature as to agitate it. Hence we see that the main-spring of passion is the sense-impression. But what is this impression? In order to answer this question, let us analyze some passional state. We shall there find four principal elements: a more or less distinct initial sensation of pleasure or pain; voluntary or involuntary movements, more or less pronounced; and, finally, a recurrent sensation consecutive to these movements. It is clear that if there were no sensation there would be no passion. On the other hand, if the sensation were but a motion, we might say that passion consists of a series of motions originating in the agitation of the sensorium produced by the internal or external causes of emotion; but, then, we never could understand why this agitation, being purely vibratory, should affect us at one time agreeably, at another painfully, or why it should act in so many different modes. Hence the power of discerning, immediately, in the sensorial perception, differences that have no mechanical equivalent, cannot be explained on mechanical grounds, and it is absolutely necessary to recognize here a psychic faculty, whose function it is to ascertain and to conceive the causes of emotions, and to regulate, according to a certain harmony, the consecutive physiological movements. Passion, therefore, resides in a something that is neither the brain, nor the nerves, nor the muscles; a something which perceives, and joys, and suffers, and which moves the entire body in unison with its own feelings. Now, this conscious faculty, this faculty of perceiving causes in no wise mechanical, is the soul. The more deeply we study the physiology of the passions, the more are we convinced that the agitation of the nervous and motor energies is but the external manifestation of deeper causes, which we denominate psychic. So, too, the more we study into matter, the better we see that it is only an external form, a vesture that clothes the activity of an invisible principle. Thus does Science ever lead us back to that eternal and mysterious thing, force, and, beyond force, to spirit.-Revue des Deux Mondes. L OUR ANCESTORS ON THE GOOSE QUESTION. ET us consider the views entertained by our ancestors for centuries on the goose question: we may gather lessons from it that will be very applicable to-day. They believed for five hundred years that a certain kind of goose was of vegetable origin, and grew on trees. The story is ancient and obscure, and much ingenuity has been spent in explaining it. Without attempting to reconcile its contradictions, or account for its origin, we will only here give a brief outline of the tradition. Belonging to that division of the animal kingdom known as articulates or jointed animals, there is a class called crustaceans, from the crust-like shell with which the body and legs are covered, and of which lobsters, crabs, and shrimps, are examples. Among these is a group known as "Cirripedia," from the cirri, or curls of hair, in which their long and slender feet terminate. They are inclosed in a more or less conical shell, and some of them are pedunculated; that is, their main body hangs from a stalk, pedicle, or peduncle, of varying length, which permits of some degree of motion. They attach themselves to floating objects, as plank, worm-eaten fragments of wreck, ships' sides, and sometimes to the cuticle of the whale. These creatures are more familiarly known as barnacles, and Fig. 1 represents a pendent group of common ship-barnacles, which are described as having "a fleshcolored, translucent, wrinkled stem, possibly more than a foot long, and from this stem there dangles a triangular, pearly-shelled fish, the valves of which, bordered with the most lovely orange, from time to time open and disclose several pairs of curling feelers." The soft part within this shell, in old times, used to be mistaken for a little bird. There is in England a well-known species of goose called the barnacle-goose. "It is a winter migrant on the east coast; its summer home, where it breeds, being the high latitudes of Northern Europe. It is a very handsome species, a vegetable-feeder, and excellent eating." Now, it would seem to be a very simple matter to end the story by saying that it was long believed that barnacle-geese had their origin in the barnacle-shells we have just referred to, but the case is more complex; the shells bearing the geese were believed to grow on trees. This belief, that the barnacle-shell is transformed into the barnacle-goose, was well established, as early as the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and was referred to and contradicted by both Albertus Magnus and by Roger Bacon. That the opinion was held as a firm reality is sufficiently proved by the fact that barnacle-geese were allowed to be eaten during Lent, under the idea that they were not fowl, but fish-an elastic zoology that served to widen ecclesiastical dietetics, although to the scandal of the more strict, as the practice was inveighed against with great unction by Sir Giraldus Cambrensis, who treated the subject, in the twelfth century, in his "Topographia Hiberniæ." Michel Drayton refers to it, in his "Polyolbion: " "The barnacles with them, which, wheresoe'er they breed On trees or rotten ships-yet to my fens for feed Baptista Porta refers to it, about the year 1500, and Count Meyer devoted a volume to it-" Volucris Arborea." The earliest published statement, by an eye-witness, is contained in the "Cosmograph and Description of Albion," of Hector Boëce, while the earliest pictorial illustration of the goose-tree, and its animal fruiting, is contained in the "Cosmographia Universalis" of Sebastian Munster, printed at Basel, 1572. In the middle of the sixteenth century, Turner, the English ornithologist, wrote as follows: "Nobody has ever seen the nest or egg of the barnacle; nor is this marvelous, inasmuch as it is without parents, and is spontaneously generated in the following manner: When, at a certain time, an old ship, a plank, or a pine mast rots in the sea, something like fungus at first breaks out thereupon, which at length puts on the manifest form of birds. Afterward, these are clothed with feathers, and at last become living and flying fowl. Should this ap |