"When the first encounter with some object surprises us... this makes us wonder and be astonished... And since this can happen before we know in the least whether this object is suitable to us or not, it seems to to me that Wonder is the first of all the passions. It has no opposite, because if the object presented has nothing in it that surprises us, we are not in the least moved by it and regard it without passion."
In Charles Darwin's The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, wonder is equated with raised eyebrows, opened lips, and
a hand held up,
palm out,
with fingers open -
reactions that, Darwin argued, increased the animal's chances of survival by making it see and breathe better in a crisis.