196 FOOD AND FEEDING 



most primitive animals do discriminate somehow between 

 what is eatable and what isn't. The amoeba has no eyes, 

 no nose, no mouth, no tongue, no nerves of taste, no 

 special means of discrimination of any kind ; and yet, so 

 long as it meets only grains of sand or bits of shell, it 

 makes no effort in any way to swallow them ; but, the 

 moment it comes across a bit of material fit for its food, it 

 begins at once to spread its clammy fingers around the 

 nutritious morsel. The fact is, every part of the amosba's 

 body apparently possesses, in a very vague form, the first 

 beginnings of those senses which in us are specialised and 

 confined to a single spot. And it is because of the light 

 which the amoeba thus incidentally casts upon the nature 

 of the specialised senses in higher animals that I have ven- 

 tured once more to drag out of the private life of his native 

 pond that already too notorious and obtrusive rhizopod. 



With us lordly human beings, at the extreme opposite 

 end in the scale of being from the microscopic jelly-specks, 

 the art of feeding and the mechanism which provides for 

 it have both reached a very high state of advanced perfec- 

 tion. We have slowly evolved a tongue and palate on the 

 one hand, and French cooks and pat& de foie gras on the 

 other. But while everybody knows practically how things 

 taste to us, and which things respectively we like and dis- 

 like, comparatively few people ever recognise that the sense 

 of taste is not merely intended as a source of gratification, 

 but serves a useful purpose in our bodily economy, in in- 

 forming us what we ought to eat and what to refuse. 

 Paradoxical as it may sound at first to most people, nice 

 things are, in the main, things that are good for us, and 

 nasty things are poisonous or otherwise injurious. That 

 we often practically find the exact contrary the dase (alas!) 

 is due, not to the provisions of nature, but to the artificial 

 surroundings in which we live, and to the cunning way in 



