The vaso-motor system is influenced by emotions. It is a little difficult to express accurately the relation between emotion and vaso-motor change. Some psychologists regard the vaso-motor change as the emotion. “All emotions,” says a prominent exponent of this view, “are wholly due to excitation of a particular kind of the vaso-motor centre.” The person about to be subject to an emotion of shame, anger, fear, disgust, recognizes a fact or circumstance, or conjunction of circumstances, 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 the 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 circumstance 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 supposed 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 unimpressionable 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 cutaneous constrictor nerves to let go their grip at the same time. Terror heightens the control of the vaso-motor centre over the vessels of the skin; it increases vagus inhibition of the heart. Even disgust evoked by a revolting sight or a foul smell may call the vagus so forcibly into action as to bring the heart to a standstill.