530 TOUCH. 



he more delicate and acute, with an equal supply of nerves, will be the sense. 

 Many without hands, as organs of touch, have other organs to compensate for 

 their absence. " "We observe, even from the polygastric animalcules, that organs 

 are developed at the anterior part of the body, which appear to be adapted to 

 communicate sensations corresponding with those of touch in the higher animals. 

 They have long cilia, almost already developed into tentacula ; and those ten- 

 tacula, so common in the class of zoophytes, appear to be endowed with great 

 delicacy of feeling. Those fleshy and sensitive tentacula and tubular feet of the 

 radiated animals continue up through many of the succeeding classes of animals, 

 becoming jointed in the articulated classes, where they form palpi and antennae ; 

 and in the soft molluscous classes they again assume the form and name of 

 tentacula, soft, sensitive, and fleshy, without any jointed appearance. We ob- 

 serve remnants of those sensitive organs even in the class of fishes in the form of 

 processes or filaments still disposed as organs of touch around the mouth." 

 " Many fishes and higher animals are covered with dense scales which must 

 deaden the general sense of touch over the surface of their bodies : other fishes 

 have the lower part of the head, the lower part of the abdomen, the circum- 

 ference of the mouth, and other exposed parts, covered with a naked, delicate, 

 and soft integument, which will compensate for the want of development of the 

 arms and hands as organs of touch. But in the land amphibious animals, and 

 in all the higher vertebrata, we observe the anterior extremities to become more 

 delicately organised, and fit for communicating delicate impressions of the forms, 

 densities, and other physical qualities of external bodies ; and in proportion to 

 the high nervous sensibility, the vascularity, the flexibility, and the softness of the 

 hands and other external cutaneous parts, will that common sense of touch become 

 increased as we pass up through the vertebrated classes to man, who surpasses 

 all inferior animals in the exquisite and equal development of all his organs of 

 sense, and in the perfection of all those higher organs of relation by which 

 animals are more immediately connected with outward nature." (Dr. Grant's 

 Lectures. Lancet, No. 569.) 



1 presume that the tongue must be considered as an organ of touch as well as of 

 taste ; and the snout in the mole and pig ; the moist upper lip in the rhinoceros ; 

 the proboscis of the elephant ; and the lower end of the tails of apes called sapajous. 

 The whiskers of the "feline and other mammalia probably serve to make the 

 proximity of bodies known to the animal. The seal has a very long infra-orbital 

 branch of the fifth pair, with about forty branches, which are distributed to 

 the upper lip, and many of which have been traced by Blumenbach to the roots 

 of the strong whiskers." (Manual of Comparative Anatomy, translated by Messrs, 

 Laurence and Coulson, p. 259. sq.) 



