up by the imminent gratification of a healthy desire. The hyena laughs, the dog grins and bounds, the child laughs and jumps for joy at the approach of something good to eat. But it is a curious fact that the whole attitude is changed when the food is within reach, and the serious business of consuming it has commenced! Nor, indeed, is the satisfaction which is felt after the gratification of appetite accompanied by laughter. It seems that the display of the teeth by drawing back the corners of the mouth, which is called a "grin," and is associated in many dogs with a short, sharp, demonstrative bark, and in mankind with the cackle we call a "laugh," is a retention, a survival, of the playful, good-natured movement of gently biting or pulling a companion with the teeth used by our animal ancestors to draw attention to their joy and to communicate it to others. Gradually it has lost the actual character of a friendly bite; the fore-feet or hand pull instead of the teeth; the sound emitted has become further differentiated from other sounds made by the animal. But the movement for the display of the teeth, though no longer needed as a part of the act of gripping, remains as an understood and universal indication of joy and kindly feeling. So universal is it that this friendly display of the teeth under the name "smile" is attributed to Nature, to Fortune, and to deities by all races of men when those powers seem to favour them. Laughter is, then, in its essence and origin, a communication or expression to others of the joyous mood of the laugher. There are many and strangely varied occasions when laughter seizes on man, and it is interesting to see how far they can be explained by this conception of the primary and essential nature of the laugh, for many of them seem at first sight remote from it. There is, first of all, the laughter of revivification and escape from death or danger. After railway accidents, earthquakes, and such terrible occurrences, those who have been in great danger often burst into laughter. The nervous balance has been upset by the shock (we call them "shocking accidents"), and the emotional joy of escape, the joy of recovered life, asserts itself in what appears to the onlooker to be an unseemly, an unfeeling laugh. It is recorded that one of the entombed French coal miners, who two years ago were imprisoned without food or light for twenty days a thousand feet below in the bowels of the earth, burst into a ghastly laugh when he was rescued and brought to the upper air once more. The Greeks and Romans in some of their festal ceremonies made the priest or actor who represented dead nature returning to life in the spring, burst into a laugh--a ceremonial or "ritual" laugh. Our poets speak of the smiles, and even of the laughter of spring, and that is why laughter is appropriate to New Year's Day. It is the laughter of escape from the death of winter and of return to life, for the true