194 FACULTIES OF BIRDS. 



is submitted to them for examination. Their touch 

 is also perhaps rendered more nice and delicate by 

 there being no fat lining the skin, as is the case in 

 most other parts of the body. The tongue also, in 

 its movements of speaking, eating, and swallowing, 

 so far as it is not affected with taste, is plainly a 

 muscular organ of touch. Dr. Haslam, however, is 

 disposed to consider it obtuse in its tactual feeling, as 

 any person, he says, may easily prove to his satisfac- 

 tion by the experiment of applying his tongue to the 

 wrist to discover the state of his pulse*. But he 

 surely forgets that the tongue can readily detect the 

 finest hair amongst food, and that Mitchell, the blind 

 and deaf boy, made great use of his tongue as an 

 organ of touch. Its supposed imperfection, when 

 applied to the pulse, arises from its flexibility and 

 deficient strength. 



In the horse the lips seem to be peculiarly adapted 

 to be an organ of touch, being large, very moveable, 

 and well supplied with nerves f; though Blumen- 

 bach says he is not so clear in considering, as has 

 been done by Derham and Darwin, the snout of the 

 mole and the swine as genuine organs of touch, much 

 less the whiskers of the cat and many other quadru- 

 peds, though he thinks these serviceable, when they 

 come in contact with any object, in warning and 

 making the animal attentive. 



Cats, according to Darwin, " seem to possess some- 

 thing like an additional sense by means of their 

 whiskers ; which have perhaps some analogy to the 

 antenna? of moths and butterflies. The whiskers of 

 cats consist not only of the long hairs on their upper 

 lips, but they have also four or five long hairs stand- 

 ing up from each eye-brow, and also two or three oil 

 each cheek; all which, when the animal erects them, 



* On Sound Mind, p. 56. 

 De Blainvillej Anat. Comp. p. 221. 



