Birds and All Nature, Vol. 5, No. 1, January 1899 / Illustrated by Color Photography

by Various

With some substances we have a mixed experience that passes for taste, but it is really a combination of taste, smell, and touch. With the nostrils held one can scarcely distinguish between small quantities of pure water and the same with a very little essence of cloves. The difference is easily observed with the nostrils open or after swallowing, for the odor of the mixture gets readily into the nose from either direction.

It is curious to note that, although there are so many varieties of taste, man has but few words to describe them with. We know the taste of a thousand substances, and yet we are in nowise superior to the veriest savage in the matter of speaking about their flavors. We are obliged to speak in the same manner as the wild man of the forest and say that a given taste is like the taste of some other thing, only different.

One of the lowest forms of tongues is that of the gasteropod. All snails and slugs are gasteropods. They have instead of a regular tongue a strip that is called a lingual ribbon, one end of which is free and the other fastened to the floor of the mouth. Across the ribbon from left to right run rows of hard projections almost like teeth. Whatever the mouth comes against is tested for food qualities by this rasping ribbon which files away at the substance and wears away not only what it works upon but the ribbon itself. This loss of tongue is no serious affair to the gasteropod, for he finds his tongue growing constantly like a finger-nail and he needs to work diligently at his trade or suffer from undue proportions of the unruly member. Snails in an aquarium gnaw the green slime from the sides of the vessel with their lingual ribbons, and the process may be seen to more or less advantage at times.

Taste is not all confined to tongues. Some people have papillæ on the inside of the cheek. Medusae (Jelly Fish) have no tongues, but the qualities of the sea-water are noted by them. As soon as rain begins to fall into the sea they proceed directly towards the bottom, showing a decided aversion to having their water thinned in any way.

Leeches show their powers of distinguishing tastes when they take in sweetened water quite freely, but suck at the skin of a sick man much less than at that of one in good health.

Taste in insects has its probable seat in many instances in a pair of short horns or feelers back of the antennæ. These are constantly moving over the parts of that which the insect is feeding upon, and so apparently enjoyable is the motion of them that many scientists have concluded that these are the taste organs of the insects having them. At the same time it is quite probable that in all insects furnished with salivary glands, a proboscis, or a tongue, the power of taste is also or exclusively there.

Fishes seem to do most of their tasting somewhere down in the stomach, for they pursue their prey voraciously and frequently swallow it whole. With their gristly gums, in many cases almost of the toughness of leather, there can be but little sensation of taste. Their equally hard tongues, many times fairly bristling with teeth constructed for capturing, but not for chewing, cannot possibly afford much of a taste of what is going down the throat with the rushing water passing through the open mouth and gills.

Serpents which swallow their food alive can get but little taste of their victims as they pass over the tongue, although they are deliberate in the act and cover them with a profusion of saliva.

It is quite possible that cattle in chewing the cud get the highest enjoyment possible from this sense. They enjoy their food at the first grasp of it, and prove it by their persistence in struggling for certain roots and grasses, but their calm delight afterwards as they lie in the shade and bring up from the recesses of their separate stomachs the choice and somewhat seasoned pellets of their morning's gleanings is an indication of their refined enjoyment of the pleasures of this sense.

Sir John Lubbock calls attention to the remarkable instances of certain insects in which the foods of the perfect insect and of the larvæ are quite different. The mother has to find and select for her offspring food which she would not herself touch. "Thus while butterflies and moths feed on honey, each species selects some particular food plant for the larvæ. Again flies, which also enjoy honey themselves, lay their eggs on putrid meat and other decaying animal substances."