91 



SOME NEW SENSE-ORGANS IN DIPTERA. 



By W. Wesche, P.R.M.S. 



{Read April loth, 1904.) 



Plates 6 and 7. 



Investigations into the sensations of creatures so far removed 

 from the mammalia as insects are hampered by the possibility 

 that these animals may possess (in the words of Lord Avebury) 

 " senses and perceptions of which at present we have do 

 conception." * 



It is true that in man we have something in the extreme 

 cultivation of particular senses which may help us to imagine 

 other perceptions in insects. For example, the man who is only 

 a little musical has no conception of the joy, pleasure, or rapture 

 (words or combinations of words cannot express the feeling) that 

 can be experienced on hearing a fine orchestra perform, in an 

 ideal manner, the masterpieces of Beethoven or Wagner. The 

 trained eye sees colour and beauties in nature which the 

 untrained eye cannot discern, and the masterpieces of painting 

 probably afford pleasure to those who have a highly cultivated 

 colour sense as much as the great tone poems afford to these 

 who have a highly cultivated musical understanding. There 

 is an anecdote of the great painter Turner which well illus- 

 trates this. A critic remarked that he could not see in 

 a landscape the blues and greens, the scarlets and yellows, 

 that Turner had sketched upon a canvas. " But don't you wish 

 you could ? " was the answer of the artist. In matters in which 

 cultivation plays no part, also, we have analogies. The call or 

 cry of the bat, being a most acute sound, is beyond the capacity 

 of the normal human ear, which can only appreciate a little 

 more than 35,000 vibrations in a second of time ; but there are 

 persons who can hear this shrill sound without effort, and it is 

 only by reason of the existence of such abnormal persons that the 

 majority of human beings know the bat has a voice. 



Through the anatomical and experimental investigations of 

 many entomologists, it seems clear that we can localise the seat> 



* Senses of Animals, -p. 193. 



