THE CIRCULATION 243 



stances, which justifies the emotion. (We are assuming that 

 emotions may be justified ; that the intellectual appreciation 

 of a situation and reasoned decision regarding the action which 

 it demands is not sufficient.) This recognition as an intellectual 

 act of the higher brain is accompanied by certain forms of 

 enhanced activity or inhibition of activity of the vaso-motor 

 centre in tho medulla oblongata which cause changes in the 

 degree of contraction of the bloodvessels of certain organs. 

 The vascular changes produce an alteration in the state of the 

 organ which is reflected in nerve-currents sent back to the 

 brain, providing the background of feeling which constitutes 

 emotional tone. We are not prepared to endorse this extreme 

 view of the nature of an emotion. A maiden's blush is not an 

 emotion of embarrassment or shame. It is its harmony. Her 

 mind plays the air. The sensations which originate in the 

 flushed skin of the face sustain it with their accompaniment. 

 The emotional tone keeps attention fixed on the fact or circum- 

 stance which led her to conclude, by the exercise of her reason, 

 that she was placed in an awkward situation. This fixing of 

 attention is frequently so pronounced as to inhibit all other 

 intellectual action. The maiden is less quick than she would 

 have been, had the emotion not glued her thoughts together, 

 in recognizing the readiest means of extricating herself from 

 embarrassment. All nerves found within the chest and 

 abdomen were in very early times termed " sympathetic." 

 The cord in the neck was the " little sympathetic." The name 

 explains itself ; but it will be understood that it implied much 

 more in the days when the liver, spleen and heart were sup- 

 posed to pour out emotions than it does now. The vagus nerve 

 was termed the " middle sympathetic." Shame inhibits the 

 activity of the vaso-constrictor nerves of the face ; dilation of 

 the vessels which they supply is accompanied with constriction 

 of other cutaneous nerves. Kipling must, we think, have 

 embellished Nature when he represents the very unimpression- 

 able hero of Lungtungpen as admitting " I niver blushed before 

 or since ; but I blushed all over my carkiss thin." Usually 

 the carmine of the face contrasts with the pallor and coldness 

 of the hands. Still, we are not prepared to assert that it is 

 impossible, under circumstances as trying as those in which 

 Private Mulvaney and his companions were placed, for all the 



162 



