VIII 



TASTE 



Like smell, taste is a chemical sense, and these two senses 

 are closely related and seem in many cases to overlap. In 

 man, it may appear almost impossible to separate tasting 

 from smelling; for as every young child knows, one good 

 way of dealing with a nasty medicine is to pinch the nose 

 and keep pinching it until the unpleasant dose has been 

 swallowed — in other words : if we suppress our smelling 

 powers, we deaden those of taste. This simple way of avoid- 

 ing being nauseated by medicines is satisfactory as far as it 

 goes ; but while pinching the nose will prevent the liquid or 

 powder from affecting us as we swallow them, as soon as 

 we release the pressure, we take in breath and have an 

 instinctive desire to touch the palate and the roof of the 

 mouth with the tongue. At once, we get the taste of the 

 substance we have swallowed. It is true that "after-taste" is 

 not so nasty as it would have been without the nose-pinching, 

 but this does show in a marked way the close connection 

 between smell and taste. 



I well remember Dr. Harrison Matthews, during a broad- 

 cast we were doing together, pointing out that as human 

 beings could only detect four basic "tastes" with their 

 tongues, all other tastes were flavours. The types of things 

 we can taste are salt, sweet, bitter and sour; and on our 

 tongues are what are known as taste-bulbs which are situated 

 in different areas of the tongue and are there to deal with 

 these basic tastes. 



In other animals very different parts of their bodies con- 

 tain their tasting organs. In some insects — flies for instance — 

 there are special hairs that serve as tongues and enable the 

 insects in question to tell whether a substance is palatable 

 or not. Other insects use their antennae as a kind of com- 

 bined smelling and tasting organ. 



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