104 MAN [Chap. VIII 



Letter 470 To F. C. Donders. 



Down, March 18th, 1871. 



Very many thanks for your kind letter. I have been 

 interested by what you tell me about your views published in 

 1848, and I wish I could read your essay. It is clear to me 

 that you were as near as possible in preceding me on the 

 subject of Natural Selection. 



You will find very little that is new to you in my last 

 book ; whatever merit it may possess consists in the grouping 

 of the facts and in deductions from them. I am now at work 

 on my essay on Expression. My last book fatigued me much, 

 and I have had much correspondence, otherwise I should have 

 written to you long ago, as I often intended to tell you in how 

 high a degree your essay published in Beale's Archives 1 

 interested me. I have heard others express their admiration 

 at the complete manner in which you have treated the 

 subject. Your confirmation of Sir C. Bell's rather loose 

 statement 2 has been of paramount importance for my work. 

 You told me that I might make further inquiries from you. 



When a person is lost in meditation his eyes often appear 

 as if fixed on a distant object, 3 and the lower eyelids may be 

 seen to contract and become wrinkled. I suppose the idea is 

 quite fanciful, but as you say that the eyeball advances 4 in 

 adaptation for vision for close objects, would the eyeball have 

 to be pushed backwards in adaptation for distant objects ? 

 If so, can the wrinkling of the lower eyelids, which has often 

 aerplexed me, act in pushing back the eyeball ? 



But, as I have said, I daresay this is quite fanciful. 

 Gratiolet says 5 that the pupil contracts in rage, and dilates 

 enormously in terror. I have not found this great anatomist 

 quite trustworthy on such points, and am making enquiries 

 on this subject. But I am inclined to believe him, as the old 

 Scotch anatomist Munro says, that the iris of parrots contracts 



1 Beale's Archives of Medicine, Vol. V., 1870. 



2 On the contraction of the muscles surrounding the eye. See 

 Expressio?i of the Emotions, p. 158. See Letters 464, 465. 



3 The appearance is due to divergence of the lines of vision produced 

 by muscular relaxation. See Expression of the Emotions, Ed. II., p. 239. 



4 Darwin seems to have misunderstood a remark of Donders. 



5 See Expression of the Emotions, Ed. II., p. 321. 



