in any indignity offered to them; but rather, such as would make you resent the indignity.  And now, while you are contemplating the reconciliation with a pleasurable sympathy, there appears from behind the scenes a tame kid, which, having stared round at the audience, walks up to the lovers and sniffs at them.  You cannot help joining in the roar which greets this contretemps.  Inexplicable as is this irresistible burst on the hypothesis of a pleasure in escaping from mental restraint; or on the hypothesis of a pleasure from relative increase of self-importance, when witnessing the humiliation of others; it is readily explicable if we consider what, in such a case, must become of the feeling that existed at the moment the incongruity arose.  A large mass of emotion had been produced; or, to speak in physiological language, a large portion of the nervous system was in a state of tension.  There was also great expectation with respect to the further evolution of the scene—­a quantity of vague, nascent thought and emotion, into which the existing quantity of thought and emotion was about to pass.

Had there been no interruption, the body of new ideas and feelings next excited would have sufficed to absorb the whole of the liberated nervous energy.  But now, this large amount of nervous energy, instead of being allowed to expend itself in producing an equivalent amount of the new thoughts and emotions which were nascent, is suddenly checked in its flow.  The channels along which the discharge was about to take place are closed.  The new channel opened—­that afforded by the appearance and proceedings of the kid—­is a small one; the ideas and feelings suggested are not numerous and massive enough to carry off the nervous energy to be expended.  The excess must therefore discharge itself in some other direction; and in the way already explained, there results an efflux through the motor nerves to various classes of the muscles, producing the half-convulsive actions we term laughter.

This explanation is in harmony with the fact, that when, among several persons who witness the same ludicrous occurrence, there are some who do not laugh; it is because there has arisen in them an emotion not participated in by the rest, and which is sufficiently massive to absorb all the nascent excitement.  Among the spectators of an awkward tumble, those who preserve their gravity are those in whom there is excited a degree of sympathy with the sufferer, sufficiently great to serve as an outlet for the feeling which the occurrence had turned out of its previous course.  Sometimes anger carries off the arrested current; and so prevents laughter.  An instance of this was lately furnished me by a friend who had been witnessing the feats at Franconi’s.  A tremendous leap had just been made by an acrobat over a number of horses.  The clown, seemingly envious of this success, made ostentatious preparations for doing the like; and then, taking the preliminary run with immense energy,