128 JOURNAL OF COMPARATIVE NEUROLOGY. 
wire, when possible so arranging the experiment that the fish 
could not see the point of contact. The fish immediately 
turned witha characteristic movementand snapped up the morsel. 
But the areas in question, particularly the barblets and free fili- 
form fin rays, are known to be very richly supplied with gen- 
eral cutaneous nerves in addition to the communis nerves for 
the terminal buds; in other words they have a very rich tactile 
innervation and doubtless are very sensitive to touch. Was 
the reaction then essentially tactile or gustatory or both? To 
test this point I replaced on the end of the wire the customary 
bit of meat with a wisp of cotton wool or a piece of colorless 
and tasteless gelatin which had been previously softened 
up in cold water. The fishes sometimes would take it at 
the first contact, though they would rarely repeat it and 
soon ceased to notice the cotton or gelatin at all. If now the 
cotton were soaked in meat juice and the contact repeated, the 
fish always instantly reacted exactly as he did to meat in the 
first instance and no amount of training would suffice to cause 
him to discontinue the reaction to the cotton when dipped in 
filtered meat juice. 
In brief, the experiments which were hundreds of times 
repeated in a great variety of forms, show that the fishes nor- 
mally react to both tactile and gustatory stimuli upon the parts 
of the body in question ; but by training they can be induced to 
discriminate between the two classes of stimuli, ignoring the 
simple tactile stimulus, but reacting to this plus the gustatory. 
I varied the experiment, among other ways, by the use of a 
fine-pointed pipette, directing a jet of water against the fish 
and then similarly applying a jet of filtered meat juice. In'the 
former case the jet was ignored or avoided; in the latter it was 
always eagerly sought, the reaction being similar to that pro- 
duced by a contact with meat, though more pronounced. 
It may be regarded as established that fishes which possess 
terminal buds in the outer skin taste by means of these organs 
and habitually find their food by their means, while fishes 
which lack these organs in the skin have the sense of taste con- 
fined to the mouth. The delicacy of the sense of taste in the 
—d 
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