acted in
this manner in order to protect their ears from being torn by their
antagonists; for those animals which do not fight with their teeth do
not thus express a savage state of mind. We may infer as highly probable
that we ourselves have acquired the habit of contracting the muscles
round the eyes whilst crying gently, that is, without the utterance of
any loud sound, from our progenitors, especially during infancy, having
experienced during the act of screaming an uncomfortable sensation in
their eyeballs. Again, some highly expressive movements result from the
endeavor to check or prevent other expressive movements; thus the
obliquity of the eyebrows and the drawing down of the corners of the
mouth follow from the endeavor to prevent a screaming-fit from coming on
or to check it after it has come on. Here it is obvious that the
consciousness and will must at first have come into play; not that we
are conscious in these or in other such cases what muscles are brought
into action, any more than when we perform the most ordinary voluntary
movements.

The power of communication between the members of the same tribe by
means of language has been of paramount importance in the development of
man; and the force of language is much aided by the expressive movements
of the face and body. We perceive this at once when we converse on an
important subject with any person whose face is concealed. Nevertheless
there are no grounds, as far as I can discover, for believing that any
muscle has been developed or even modified exclusively for the sake of
expression. The vocal and other sound-producing organs by which various
expressive noises are produced seem to form a partial exception; but I
have elsewhere attempted to show that these organs were first developed
for sexual purposes, in order that one sex might call or charm the
other. Nor can I discover grounds for believing that any inherited
movement which now serves as a means of expression was at first
voluntarily and consciously performed for this special purpose--like
some of the gestures and the finger-language used by the deaf and dumb.
On the contrary, every true or inherited movement of expression seems to
have had some natural and independent origin. But when once acquired,
such movements may be voluntarily and consciously employed as a means of
communication. Even infants, if carefully attended to, find out at a
very early age that their screaming brings relief, and