To Frans Cornelis Donders   13 May [1870]1

Down | Beckenham | Kent S.E.

May 13th.

My dear Sir,

In about a fortnight’s time I shall begin to arrange my notes on Expression: & it would be a great assistance to me if you could spare time to give me some notion of any conclusion at which you may have arrived, on the cause of the contraction of the muscles round the eyes during screaming &c2

Secondly, can you give me any explanations why tears are poured out when these same muscles are spasmodically contracted, as during violent choking vomiting &c without any mental emotion such as grief being felt. I find that the voluntary, prolonged & strong contraction of these muscles, even with children, does not cause tears to flow, or hardly at all. I hope my questions will not cause you much trouble, as I know your time is taken up by valuable researches.

I have lately read in an English Journal with extreme interest an abstract of your experiments on the rate of the travelling of the nervous powers.3

With very sincere respect | pray believe me, my dear Sir, | yours faithfully | Charles Darwin.

Copy

1
The year is established by the relationship between this letter and the letter from F. C. Donders, 17 May 1870.
2
CD refers to his research for Expression; Donders had been conducting experiments to answer questions posed by CD, and reiterated here, concerning Charles Bell’s account of the physiology of weeping (see Correspondence vol. 17, letter to F. C. Donders, 6 September 1869 and n. 2, and letter from F. C. Donders, 12 November 1869).
3
CD refers to Donders’s development of a technique (now commonly called the ‘subtraction method’) for measuring the duration of a psychological process by measuring reaction time. Donders’s article ‘Over de snelheid van psychische processen’ (The speed of mental processes; Donders 1868) appeared in Dutch, German, and French. The English abstract has not been identified, but the article is now available in English (Donders 1969).

Please cite as “DCP-LETT-7187,” in Ɛpsilon: The Charles Darwin Collection accessed on 5 June 2025, https://epsilon.ac.uk/view/dcp-data/letters/DCP-LETT-7187