Facial Muscles of Expression.

This record in terms of hair of personal and ancestral emotions has, however, a link with certain more numerous and important striated muscles, such as the facial muscles of man and apes, modifications of the great platysma-sheet, and which are disposed in two layers, a deep and a superficial. This covers like a hood at the third month the head and neck of the embryo, and later assumes on the face its specialised form of certain bands which operate round the eyes and mouth. As they are of the striated kind these muscles can be moved at will, but their main action is much more under the government of the mental processes of their possessor. As they are fundamentally the same in apes and man very little new muscular structure arises in man, and little more than shaping or refining takes place.

The facial muscles which operate round the orbit have less mental action represented in them than those of the mouth, though the action of the special elevator of the upper eyelid is conspicuous among the expressions of a vigorous person. Both apes and man have muscles on each side which raise or lower the angles of the mouth, draw the angles upwards and outwards, and raise the upper and depress the lower lip; and, though the muscle of the mouth which corresponds to the orbicularis of the eye is not a continuous structure, but formed of interrupted bundles of fibres, it is powerful in closing the lips and active in the expressions. There are also in man scattered oblique fibres in the substance of the lower lip, well-developed and closely-set in a sucking child, and these in the adult are scattered and less conspicuous.

There is thus a remarkable set of structures in the face of a higher primate which convey mental emotion. As they also belong to animals with a high degree of convolu­tion of brain, though certain are found in lower mammals, their specialisa­tion is only to be accounted for by the long-continued involuntary expression of mental states existing in the particular form of primate. Professor Keith says in the work before referred to: “Muscles supplied by the facial nerve are the physical basis into which many mental states are reflected, and in which they are realised. Through them mental conditions are manifested. It is found that the differentia­tion of this sheet into well-marked and separate muscles proceeds pari passu with the development of the brain. The more highly convoluted the brain of any primate the more highly specialised are its facial muscles,”[74] and he points out in a smaller work[75] that in the gibbon, and monkeys of the Old and New Worlds the facial system becomes simpler and at the same time more robust, and he pictures the facial muscles as the “servants of the brain.”

If an ape can express a good many of the coarser emotions of an animal by the action of its facial muscles, and through kindness and training exhibit some of the finer ones, there is a wide distance between this level of attainment and the multiplied moods and unnumbered varieties of expression which give to the human face its unique charm. If we can express pleasure, pain, anger, contempt, hatred, surprise, affection, sympathy, fear, hope, reflec­tion, perplexity, gaiety, melancholy, cunning (and many another can be supplied) what a remarkable field of physiology in terms of anatomy we have in the facial muscles! There is a very obvious reason why none of these emotions have been fixed in an objective form in ape or man, as the patch of reversed hair is on the back of a lion, for moods and states of feeling in every individual man are subject to such endless variations that it would be impossible for them to stamp any individual face with a record of even one emotion which could be transmitted to descendants, to say nothing of the inconceivably great probability that heredity would at once swamp any initial modifica­tion.