To F. C. Donders 29 March 1872
Down | Beckenham | Kent
March 29. | 1872
My dear Professor Donders
In your letter about the eyes of a person lost in meditation, which interested me so much, you shew that the eyes are not fixed, & that the lines of vision even diverge; the divergence being greater, the more the eyes are upturned. You consider this divergence as passive, or as due to the relaxation “of the internal muscles”.1 Now I am anxious to learn which are these muscles; & why, when all the muscles are passive, do these pull the eyeballs, & the more outwards the more the eyes are upturned? Are they stronger than the other muscles, so as to conquer them when all are equally passive or relaxed? I am the more anxious to understand this, from what Sir C. Bell of the rolling upwards & inwards of the eyes during sleep, fainting &c He accounts for this movement by the four voluntary straight muscles ceasing to act as consciousness fails, & being then overmastered by the oblique muscles, which he says are little or not at all under the power of the will.2
Is this correct? I ask because I have heard that Bell was mistaken about the oblique muscles. But what most concerns & perplexes me is, that according to Bell, when consciousness begins to fail & the muscles of the eye are relaxed, the eyeballs are turned upwards, & inwards;3 where as you have shewn that when the mind is lost in meditation & the muscles are relaxed, the eyeballs are turned outwards, & so much the more outwards the more the eyeballs are upturned. If during incipient sleep or fainting the eyeballs had rolled outwards, the 2 cases wd. have been harmonious. Now will you forgive me for being so very troublesome, & before long try to remove my difficulty?
I am now getting on pretty well with my essay on Expression, but I have been sadly delayed by ill health all last summer & Autumn.4
With cordial thanks for your former kind & to me invaluable assistance, believe me | my dear Professor Donders | yours very sincerely | Charles Darwin
Footnotes
Bibliography
Bell, Charles. 1844. The anatomy and philosophy of expression as connected with the fine arts. Preface by George Bell, and an appendix on the nervous system by Alexander Shaw. 3d edition, enlarged. London: John Murray.
Correspondence: The correspondence of Charles Darwin. Edited by Frederick Burkhardt et al. 29 vols to date. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1985–.
Marginalia: Charles Darwin’s marginalia. Edited by Mario A. Di Gregorio with the assistance of Nicholas W. Gill. Vol. 1. New York and London: Garland Publishing. 1990.
Summary
Comments on action of eyes in a person lost in meditation. Asks about Charles Bell’s explanation [in Anatomy of expression (1806, 1844)].
Letter details
- Letter no.
- DCP-LETT-8257
- From
- Charles Robert Darwin
- To
- Frans Cornelis (Franciscus Cornelius) Donders
- Sent from
- Down
- Source of text
- American Philosophical Society (Mss.B.D25.)
- Physical description
- C 4pp
Please cite as
Darwin Correspondence Project, “Letter no. 8257,” accessed on 18 April 2024, https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/letter/?docId=letters/DCP-LETT-8257.xml
Also published in The Correspondence of Charles Darwin, vol. 20