Savannah courier. (Savannah, Tenn.) 1885-1979, 1892-04-14
VALUE OF A WoMAN's TEARS.
More Soothing Than a Cup of Tea and a
Most Potent Argument.

More Soothing Than a Cup of Tea and
Most Potent Argument.
There is no subject on which so much
that is sentimental, brutal, unkind.
tender, sarcastic and app -eciative as a
woman's tears has been written. Ad-
jectives the most various have been
used to express the qualities of tears.
They have been called 'hot," ''cold,"
'languid," "briny," gushing" gilt
tering," "round," "dull," SILENT"
"wearied," "wanton," and know not
what else. They are waves of emo
ton, and as general expression they
are said to spring always from the
heart-an expression singularly truth
full, for no one ever wept from the
head; that is, no one ever reasoned him
self or herself into tears except through
an appeal back to emotion.
The poets have dealt with what may
be considered, from their point of view,
chemistry of tears They have written
about salt tears" "crystal tears"
poisonous tears" "honeyed tears" and
the like. They are, to some extent,
correct in their poetic guesses. Tears
are saline, for they carry trace of the
| chloride of sodium or common salt
which exists in the blood; they may be
poisonous, for in persons under the in
| fluence Of a soluble poison, like a salt
of antimony, they may convey an in
| finitesimal part of such poisonous ma
terial; they may be honeyed, for in dia-
| betes the tears do sometimes become
| saccharine, like the other fluid secre-
| tions.
But this sort of thing is exceptional
| In general way, tears are made up of
pure water holding a trace of saline
matter and nothing more; the glands
which secrete them are the purest wells
of pure water in the body Tears are
| the result of a nervous storm in the CEN
trail nervous system, under which there
is such a change in the vascular ter
minals of the tear-secreting glands that
the excretion of water from the gland
| is profuse. Some eXcretion is always
| in progress, in order that the surface OF
the eye may be laved and cleared OF
foreign matters which may come in con.
tact with 1t, but the controlling center
is at distance,
AS the muscular power that extends
or flexes finger is at distance from
the part moved, so the excitement tc
tears is from an irritation in distant
nervous center is either soothed or ex
hausted. The persons who weep say
that tears afford relief Nothing is more
perfectly true, nothing more clear
when the facts are understood. The
relief comes not from the mere escape
of tears, which is only symptom, bu
from the cessation of the storm in tn,
| nervous cham.
If the storm be calmed by soothing
measures, as when we soothe a chile
that is weeping from fear, annoyance O
injury, we quiet the nervous centers
upon which the effect ceases. In chill
dreD the soothing method succeeds, ant
sometimes it succeeds in adults, al
though in adults the cessation of tear
is more commonly due to actual ex
haustion following period of nervou
activity. But after absorbing all thi
varied and abstruse information tn
only thing an average woman think
about her tears is that they are agreate
relief than a cup of tea, and the mos
potent argument she can employ. Chi
cago Tribune.