252 Animal Life and Intelligence. 



in capturing its blanket. This, however, it constricted, 

 and proceeded to swallow with abundant satisfaction. 



It may here be mentioned that the scales and skin of 

 many fishes are provided with sense-organs which very 

 closely resemble the taste-buds of higher animals. They 

 occur in the head and along the " lateral line " which runs 

 down the side of the fish, and may be readily seen, for 

 example, in the cod. Mr. Bateson's * careful observations 

 at Plymouth gave, however, no indication of the possession 

 of an olfactory or gustatory function, and their place in 

 the sensory economy of the fish remains problematical. In 

 or near the mouth similar end-organs are found to be some- 

 what variously developed in different fishes on the palate 

 and lips, on the gill-bars, more rarely on the tongue, and on 

 the barbels of the rockling and the pout. How far any or all 

 of these have a gustatory function remains to be proved. 



Anglers and fishermen, however, from their everyday 

 experience, and naturalists from special observations, do 

 not doubt that fishes have a sense of taste. Professor 

 Herdman's recent experiments on feeding fishes with nudi- 

 branchs f (naked molluscs) seem to show, for example, that 

 the fishes concerned, including shannies, flat-fish, cod, 

 rockling, and others, have a sense of taste leading them 

 to reject these molluscs as nasty. They show, too, that 

 some of the nudibranchs (Doris, Ancula, Eolis) are pro- 

 tected by warning coloration. 



Our knowledge of the sense of taste among the lower 

 (invertebrate) animals is imperfect, and is largely based 

 rather on observation of their habits than on the evidence 

 of anatomical structure. Here, again, comes in the 

 difficulty of distinguishing between taste and smell. But 

 even if the caterpillars which refuse to eat all but one or 

 two special herbs, or the races of bloodsuckers which seem 

 to have individual and special tastes, are guided in part 

 by an olfactory sense, there is much evidence which seems 



** " Sense-Organs and Perception of Fishes : " Journal of Marine Bio- 

 logical Association, New Series, vol. i. No. 3, p. 225. 

 t Nature, vol. xlii. p. 201. 



