398 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



equivalent to glee or music — its spire of bell-shaped flowers rising 

 above tlie covert of fox and hare, suggesting the old tintinnabulum, 

 a chime of small bells fixed on an arched support. 



The other group of the Gerardias seldom exceeds a foot in height; 

 the foliage is scant, often filiform, and the flowers are open bells of a 

 purplish pink, very gay when blooming profusely on sandy barrens. 

 The one group are the plants of rich woodlands, the other of thin, 

 arid soil, of salt marshes, and of the seashore, but each one records the 

 name of John Gerarde as he would have best liked it to be preserved. 

 Never within his loved garden at Holborn, they are still a fitting 

 memorial of him who so carefully studied their kindred, and 



" Kydst the hidden kindes of many a weede." 



THE PSYCHOLOGICAL CAUSE OF LAUGHTER. 



By M. CAMILLE MJ^LLINAND. 



"TX/'E laugh under the most diverse circumstances. Curious inci- 

 T T dents of the most various character, some absurdly trifling 

 and others rising into different degrees of importance, will provoke 

 the feeling that prompts laughter, or the emotion of the ludicrous; 

 for it is this with which we have to do, rather than with the audible 

 explosion. Our inquiry is into the interior cause, into the moral 

 element in the incident that provokes the feeling, and into what 

 takes place in the nervous centers. The study of this is important, 

 and has been well prosecuted by recent authors of the day, but the 

 purely psychological element should not be neglected. 



At the beginning of our inquiry we meet the common opinion 

 that the feeling of laughter is caused by joy. This has the merit of 

 simplicity; but joy does not always make us laugh, for there are 

 serious joys; and we frequently laugh without being joyful, and 

 even sometimes at things that are sad. 



Another opinion, to which Darwin inclines, is that laughter is 

 provoked by what is queer, unusual, by what disagrees with or is con- 

 trary to our mental habits, or interrupts the familiar course. The 

 queer, the old-fashioned, the provincial, partake, we admit, of the 

 ludicrous. Caricatures amuse because of their exaggerations of pro- 

 portions in contradiction to all natural laws. "We recognize that there 

 is something queer in everything that excites laughter, and that no 

 word, act, situation, or attitude can be really laughable without hav- 

 ing something strange about it. 



Yet the queer does not always make us laugh. There are things 

 contrary to the normal order that have nothing ludicrous about 



