Forel seems to have found that certain insects smell with their antennæ, but do not taste with them. He gave his ants honey mixed with strychnine and morphine. The smell of the honey attracted them and they followed what seemed to be the bidding of their antennæ, but the instant the honey with its medication touched their lips they abandoned the stuff.

Will fed wasps with crystals of sugar till they came regularly for it. Then he substituted grains of alum for the sugar. They came and began their feast as usual, but soon their sense of taste told them there was some mistake and they retired vigorously rubbing their mouth parts to take away the puckering sensation of the alum.

Cigar smokers who really enjoy the weed confess that they cannot tell except by sight when the cigar goes out. In the dark they keep right on drawing air through the cigar, and the pleasure of the smoke seems to be in nowise diminished after the cigar is out unless the smoker discovers he has no light. This seems to show that the sense of taste has little to do with the pleasure of smoking.

Tongues are used in tasting, seizing food, assisting the teeth to chew, covering the food with saliva, swallowing, and talking. Man and the monkey, having hands to grasp food, do not use their tongues for this purpose. The giraffe does so much reaching and straining after food in the branches of trees that his tongue has become by long practice a deft instrument for grasping. The woodpecker uses his tongue as a spear, and the anteater runs his long tongue into the nest of a colony of ants, so as to catch large numbers of the little insects on its sticky surface.

Cats and their kind have a peculiarity in that instead of having cone-shaped papillæ their tongues are covered with sharp spines of great strength. These are used in combing the fur and in scraping bones.

Two characteristic accomplishments of man would not be his if it were not for his versatile tongue; they are spitting and whistling. The drawing of milk in nursing is an act of the tongue, and the power of its muscles as well as the complete control of its movements is an interesting provision of nature. It is believed by some that the pleasures of the taste sense are confined to such animals as suckle their young.

Tongues are rough because the papillæ, which in ordinary skin are hidden beneath the surface, come quite through and stand up like the villi of the digestive canal. The red color of the tongue is due to the fact that the papillæ are so thinly covered that the blood circulating within shows through.


FROM COL. CHI. ACAD. SCIENCES.PUMA.
⅙ Life-size.
COPYRIGHT 1899, NATURE STUDY PUB. CO., CHICAGO.
CHICAGO COLORTYPE CO., CHIC. & NEW YORK