WEEPING OF MAN AND BRUTE.
Expression of the Emotion,
page 153.
Infants while young do not shed tears or weep, as is known to nurses and medical men. This circumstance is not exclusively due to the lachrymal glands being as yet incapable of secreting tears. I first noticed this fact from having accidentally brushed with the cuff of my coat the open eye of one of my infants, when seventy-seven days old, causing this eye to water freely; and, though the child screamed violently, the other eye remained dry, or was only slightly suffused with tears. A similar slight effusion occurred ten days previously in both eyes during a screaming-fit. The tears did not run over the eyelids and roll down the cheeks of this child, while screaming badly, when one hundred and twenty-two days old. This first happened seventeen days later, at the age of one hundred and thirty-nine days. A few other children have been observed for me, and the period of free weeping appears to be very variable. In one case, the eyes became slightly suffused at the age of only twenty days; in another, at sixty-two days. With two other children, the tears did not run down the face at the ages of eighty-four and one hundred and ten days; but in a third child they did run down at the age of one hundred and four days. In one instance, as I was positively assured, tears ran down at the unusually early age of forty-two days. It would appear as if the lachrymal 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 fixed and perfected. This is all the more likely with a habit like weeping, which must have been acquired since the period when man branched off from the common progenitor of the genus Homo and of the non-weeping anthropomorphous apes.
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Page 135.
A woman, who sold a monkey to the Zoölogical Society, believed to have come from Borneo (Macacus maurus or M. inornatus of Gray), said that it often cried; and Mr. Bartlett, as well as the keeper Mr. Sutton, have repeatedly seen it, when grieved, or even when much pitied, weeping so copiously that the tears rolled down its cheeks.
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Page 155.
A New Zealand chief “cried like a child because the sailors spoiled his favorite 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 occurrence 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.
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Page 167.
The Indian elephant is known sometimes to weep. Sir E. Tennent, in describing those which he saw captured and bound in Ceylon, says some “lay motionless on the ground, with no other indication of suffering than the tears which suffused their eyes and flowed incessantly.” Speaking of another elephant he says: “When overpowered and made fast, his grief was most affecting; his violence sank to utter prostration, and he lay on the ground, uttering choking cries, with tears trickling down his cheeks.”