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Show 154 EXPRESS! ON OF SUFFERING: CHAP. V!. 42 days. It would appear as if the lacrymal glands required some practice in the individual before they are easily excited into action, in somewhat the same manner as various inherited consensual movements and tastes require some exercise before they are fixe~ and perfected. This is all the more likely .with .a habit like weeping, which must have been acquued since the period when man branched off from the common ~rogenitor of the genus Homo and of the non-weeping anthropomorphous apes. The fact of tears not being shed at a very early age from pain or any mental emotion is remarkable, as, later in life, no expression is more general or more strongly marked than weeping. When the habit has once been acquired by an infant, it expresses in the clearest manner suffering of all kinds, both bodily pain and mental distress, even though accompanied by other emotions, such as fear or rage. The character of the crying, however, changes at a very early age, as I noticed in my own infants,-the passionate cry differing from that of grief. A lady informs me that her child, nine months old, when in a passion screams loudly, but does not weep ; tears, however, are shed when she is punished by her chair being turned with its back to the table. This difference may perhaps be attributed to weeping being restrained, as we shall immediately see, at a more advanced age, under most circumstances excepting grief; and to the influence of such restraint being transmitted to an earlier period of life, than that at which it was first practised. With adults, especially of the male sex, weeping soon ceases to be caused by, or to express, bodily pain. This may be accounted for by its being thought weak and unmanly by men, both of civilized and barbarous races, to exhibit bodily pain by any outward sign. With CHAP. !. WEEPING. 155 this exception, savages weep copiously from very slight causes, of which fact Sir J. Lubbock 8 has collected instances. A New Zealand chief "cried like a child " because the sailors spoilt his favourite cloak by '' powdering it with flour." I saw in Tierra del Fuego a native who had lately lost a brother, and who alternately cried with hysterical violence, and laughed heartily at anything which amused him. With the civilized nations of Europe there is also much difference in the frequency of weeping. Englishmen rarely cry, except under the pressure of the acutest grief; whereas in some parts of the Continent the men shed tears much more readily and freely. The insane notoriously give way to all their emotions with little or no restraint; and I am informed by Dr. J. Crichton Browne, that nothing is more characteristic of simple melancholia, even in the male sex than a tendency to weep on the slightest occasions, or' from no cause. They also weep disproportionately on the. occurre:nce of .any real cause of grief. The length of time during which some patients weep is astonishing, as well as the amount of tears which they shed. One melancholic girl wept for a whole day, and afterwards confessed to Dr. Browne, that it was because she remembered tha~ she had once shaved off her eyebrows t~ p:omote the1: growth. Many patients in the asylum s1t for a long time rocking themselves backwards and forwards; "and if spoken to, they stop their move" ments, purse up their eyes, depress the corners of " the mouth, and burst out crying." In some of these cases, the being s~ok?n to or kindly greeted appears to suggest some fanciful and sorrowful notion · but in other cases an effort of any kind excites we~ping, 8 ''rhe Origin of Civilization,' 1870, p. 355. |