228 ANIMAL LIFE 
of both points will give the sensation of but a single con- 
tact. Repeat the experiment on the tip of the forefinger, 
and both points will be felt until the points are only about 
one tenth of an inch apart. 
120. The sense of taste—The sense of taste enables us to 
test in some degree the chemical constitution of substances 
which are taken into the mouth as food. We discriminate 
by the taste organs between good food and bad, well-tasting 
and ill-tasting. These organs are, with us and the other air- 
breathing animals, located in the mouth or on the mouth 
parts. They must be located so as to come into contact 
with the food, and it is also necessary that the food sub- 
stance to be tasted be made liquid. This is accomplished 
by the fluids poured into the mouth from the salivary 
glands. With the lower aquatic animals it is not improb- 
able that taste organs are situated on other parts of the 
body besides the mouth, and that taste is used not only to 
test food substances, but also to test the chemical char- 
acter of the fluid medium in which they live. 
The taste organs are much like the tactile organs, ex- 
cept that the special taste cell is exposed, so that small par- 
ticles of the substance to be tasted can come into actual 
contact with it. The nerve-ending is usually in a: small 
raised papilla or depressed pit. In the simplest animals 
there is no special organ of taste, and yet Ameba and 
other Protozoa show that they appreciate the chemical con- 
stitution of the liquid in which they lie. They taste—that 
is, test the chemical constitution of the substances—by 
means of their undifferentiated body surface. The taste 
organs are not always to be told from the organs of smell. 
Where an animal has a certain special seat of smell, like 
the nose of the higher animals, then the special sense 
organs of the mouth can be fairly assumed to be taste 
organs; but where the seat of both smell and taste is in 
the mouth or mouth parts, it is often impossible to distin- 
guish between the two kinds of organs. 
