140 JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



or Elizabeth or Mary Queen of Scots without one. The spice- 

 box was a great institution on the hall table in medieval times. 

 " If you can't sit above the salt sit close to the spice-box " is an 

 old proverb, i.e. in any case do the best you can. 



The Five Senses. 



Let us devote just a minute to the gateway arch of all human 

 knowledge — the five primary senses. (1) We begin with touch 

 or feeling because that is the mother sense, as it were, of all the 

 others. To the young of all animals touch means warmth and 

 food. You may have noticed the milky eyes of a new-born 

 baby staring at nothing ; but if it grasps you with its tiny hand 

 you will have some notion of its great strength of grasp out of 

 all seeming proportion to its age and size. 



(2) Taste runs touch very closely, and is perhaps really com- 

 pounded of touch and smell, because if you close your eyes and 

 nostrils firmly, so as not to see, or get any flavour or aroma of 

 what you are eating or drinking, you cannot really tell what 

 your food or drink may happen to be. I remember learning this 

 fact very early in life. My grandmother always thought my 

 mother quite incapable of managing her own baby, and having 

 an extensive knowledge of rural medicine she used to practise 

 upon me to her dear old heart's content. Most herbal remedies 

 I could drink off without faltering, but I drew the line at castor 

 oil. Hence the old dame used to hold my nose tightly whilst 

 she poured it down my throat. 



(3) Smell I place third on the list because it often seems to 

 come before sight in animal evolution. Puppy dogs find their 

 mother by touch or scent long before they can see, as is well 

 known. Of all the senses it is, so far as animals are concerned, 

 one of the very first importance. In the tropics, monkeys and 

 bats alike hunt by scent rather than by sight. This is especially 

 true of the fruit-eating animals and birds. Vultures, condors, 

 and other carrion eating birds, and some fishes, sharks, &c, 

 by scent detect their food at distances that would seem incredible 

 did not travellers agree in their testimony. With insects 

 generally the sense of smell is extremely acute, as all entomo- 

 logists agree in telling us ; and although Sir John Lubbock's 

 well-known experiments proved beyond question that insects see 

 colours, and prefer blue to red, and red to yellow, yet it remains 



