2i 6 STUDIES IN LIFE AND SENSE. 



rice, which they are requested to retain in the mouth for a given 

 time. At the expiry of the period the rice is examined, when it is 

 generally found that in the case of the guilty person the morsel is as 

 dry as when he received it, the rice of his fellows being duly 

 moistened. The suspension of secretion under the influence of fear 

 may not be of universal occurrence. It is conceivable and probable 

 that a person of strong will, even although labouring under the 

 conviction of conscious guilt, might successfully pass through the 

 ordeal ; but the essential hold of the operator is in the influence of 

 fear and the terror of detection by a process which the guilty person 

 equally with his innocent neighbours believes to be all-powerful for 

 the designed end. The feeling of conscious innocence would tend to 

 promote the flow of saliva, whilst that of guilt would produce the 

 opposite effect. Thus the common complaint of feeling " out of 

 sorts " under the influence of worry and vexation, is but an illustra- 

 tion, drawn from every-day existence, of the effects of mental irrita- 

 tion upon the ordinary functions of the body, and an impaired 

 digestion may thus appear as the true product of a mental worry. 

 John Hunter's words, that "there is not a natural action in the 

 body, whether involuntary or voluntary, that may not be influenced 

 by the peculiar state of the mind at the time," may be viewed in the 

 light of a simple truism. And sagely Burton delivers himself in his 

 " Anatomy of Melancholy," when he remarks, that " Imagination is 

 the medium defens of passions, by whose means they work and 

 produce many times prodigious effects; and as the phantasie is 

 more or less intended or remitted and their humours disposed, so 

 do perturbations move more or less, and make deeper impression." 



Most persons have heard of the idea which attributes the occur- 

 rence of jaundice to some strong disgust experienced by the subject 

 of the affection, which, as is well known, simply consists in suppres- 

 sion of the bile or secretion of the liver although by physicians 

 jaundice is viewed rather as a symptom of other affections than as 

 constituting of itself a primary disease. The bile was accounted 

 in the early days of physiological research one of the humours, 

 wherein was stored black care, or that "green and yellow melan- 

 choly" of which Shakespeare speaks. The same ideas which referred 

 the passions to the various organs of the body and which still 

 figuratively survive when we speak of "a fit of the spleen," of the 

 " meditative spleen " of Wordsworth, or of the " heart " as base, 

 wicked, grateful, or glad assigned to the bile no very auspicious 

 office as the generator of melancholy and brooding care. " Achilles 

 hath no gall within his breast" is an Homeric expression, indicative 

 of a belief in the absence of melancholy or fear in the hero ; and 

 Juvenal asks : 



Quid referam quanta siccum jecur ardeat ira? 



