Contributions from the Biological Laboratory of the U. S. Fish Commission, 
Woods Hole, Massachusetts. 
THE ORGAN AND SENSE OF TASTE IN FISHES. 
By C. JUDSON HERRICK, 
Professor of Zoology in Denison University. 
INTRODUCTION. 
The practical problems connected with the fisheries have been attacked (and in 
large measure successfully solved) 1 >y a rough-and-ready application of the method 
of trial and error, and the scientific investigator has merely to follow after and 
explain why a given form of trap or method of lure is successful with one species of 
fish and not with another. But there remain many unsolved problems of great 
economic importance, and it is the function of scientific research to contribute to the 
solution of these problems in a more orderly and economical manner, even though it 
often happens that the investigator best qualified to solve the scientific problem has 
not the practical knowledge of fishery matters necessary to apply his own results to 
economic problems, and so his facts have to be worked over from the other point of 
view before they become practically useful. 
We are, in fact, profoundly ignorant of the senses and instincts of the fishes, 
even those connected with their feeding habits, which are of so direct importance to 
all commercial fisheries. Nearly all which one finds in the scientific literature bear- 
ing on the senses of fishes is merely inference of function based on a study of the 
structure of the organs — a most precarious pathway for scientific research. My 
own studies on the nerve components of fishes have led me to certain inferences 
regarding the functions and the distribution of the organs of taste in fishes, and the 
present study is an attempt to follow out these inferences by the determination of 
more exact facts regarding the pathways of gustatory stimuli as anatomically demon- 
strable, together with sufficient direct physiological experiment to furnish definite 
information of the function served by this system of sense organs and of their 
nervous paths in the fishes. 
Neurologists have always paid a great deal of attention to the conduction paths 
within the central nervous system, and in recent years special efforts have been made 
to isolate the various functional systems of neurones, tracing the exact path of the 
sensory impulses from the peripheral organ to the primary sensory center, thence to 
the various secondary centers and return reflex paths. This motive underlies the 
recent studies on the nerve components and, indeed, much of the best morphological 
work on the nervous system in all times. 
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