A Deer's Bill of Fare. 



195 



like ours, is still of the cleanest, most appetizing sort, the 

 newest and freshest growth. Their palate is stronger 

 than ours, and they often eat a plant that we cannot quite 

 relish with zest because it has a little too much tang to it, 

 but having tasted many things which I know they eat with 

 pleasure, I should expect to find, in the vast majority of 

 cases, any food which they like not repugnant to our 

 palate if partaken of in reduced strength. So that, in the 

 last analysis, it is largely a question of quantity, not of 

 quality, in which our tastes differ. Their palates do not 

 accept food which we find in small amounts rank and 

 hateful. Whether the deer have a palate more sensitive 

 than ours, or as sensitive, I do not know. Of course, 

 the variety of our food and the range of difference from 

 all sorts of fruits and vegetables to meats and highly 

 flavored sauces, complicated to the extreme degree, and 

 to wines of extraordinary deHcacy, a little infinity of 

 items, comprise a vast gamut beyond the possibilities of 

 the deer's bill of fare. But that is not a demonstration 

 that our palate is more sensitive than theirs. If refinement 

 and cultivation consist in the power of perception and 

 discrimination of slight diiferences, then it may be that 

 the palm must be given to the deer. Their sense of taste 

 is supplemented by the marvelous gift of scent. Their 

 power of scent is incomparably more sensitive and power- 

 ful than ours, and these two organs of scent and taste are 

 very closely related. Every one knows from painful per- 

 sonal experience that with a severe cold in the head, 

 which deprives him for the time being of the capacity of 

 smelling anything, the sense of taste also disappears. 

 Even the slight power of scent which man possesses he 

 often impairs by excessive use of tobacco, and thereby as 



