Now, just what is this singular phenomenon of laughter, so readily induced and from such a variety of causes? What is there in the words of an actor, the antics of a clown, or the misfortune of another person, to provoke, under the circumstances mentioned, the peculiar reaction of bodily and facial contortion and inarticulate vocal utterance that, regarded dispassionately, seems almost repulsive? What useful purpose can be served by such behaviour, such an obvious departure from the well-ordered ways of the reasoning life? In a word, why do we laugh? It is a question far more easily asked than answered, as every one has discovered who has really pondered it. The answer that immediately comes to mind—“We laugh because we are amused”—not only is hopelessly inadequate, but to a large extent is incorrect. It can readily be shown that people sometimes laugh in situations where their mental state is anything but that of amusement. In one well-authenticated instance a frontiersman, on returning to his home and finding it in ruins, with his wife and children mutilated corpses, began to laugh and continued laughing until he died from the rupture of a blood-vessel. In another case, cited among the responses to a questionnaire on laughter issued by that well-known American psychologist, President G. Stanley Hall of Clark University, a number of young people from nineteen to twenty-four years of age were sitting together when the death of a friend was announced. “They looked at each other for a second, and then all began to laugh, and it was some time before they could become serious.” A young woman, replying to the same questionnaire, confessed that she often laughed when hearing people speak of the death of their friends, “not because it is funny or pleases her, but because she cannot help it.” Another young woman reported that on hearing of the death of a former school-mate she felt deeply grieved, yet “laughed as heartily as she had ever done in her life,” and, in spite of every effort to control herself, “had to break out into a laugh repeatedly.” A third “must always laugh when she hears of a death, and has had to leave the church at a funeral because she must giggle.” Even the shock of a severe physical pain is known to provoke occasionally, not tears but laughter. “A young man,” says C. G. Lange, “whom I was treating with a powerful caustic for an ulceration of the tongue, invariably, at the moment when the pain was at its highest, was attacked by a violent outburst of laughter.”