184 
ANATOMY AND PHYSIOLOGY 
tip of the proboscis, which is commonly provided 
with glandular points. 
The sense of smell, or at least some power which 
communicates analogous intimations to the sensorium, 
is in a high state of perfection ; for the distance from 
which insects are attracted by the fetor of some choice 
pabulum, or the scent of some favourite flower, (such 
as the catkins of the willow in early spring,) is truly 
astonishing. Yet nothing is more uncertain than the 
organs by which this service is so admirably perform- 
ed ; and there is scarcely any part of the body to 
which the olefactory perceptions have not been 
assigned by different physiologists. Lyonnet, Bons- 
dorf, and Marcel de Serres, considered the palpi as 
the organs of smell ,* Camparetti, various appendages 
of the head ; Rosenthal and Robineau Desvoidy, a 
small vesicular membrane, between the antennee of 
the Muscidse ; and Kirby and Spence, the rhinarium 
or nostril-piece. The last named authors detected a 
pair of spongy bodies under the tegument of the part 
so named in Necrophorus Vespillo and Dytiscus mar • 
ginalis , and they suppose similar parts to exist in 
other insects. But M. Treviranus, and other anato- 
mists, have been unable to discover them, and there 
can be no doubt that the Fathers of British Entomo- 
logy have, in this rare instance, fallen into error, or 
at least assigned too much importance to a variable, 
evanescent, and non-essential part of structure. 
From the consideration that this sense, in the ver- 
tebrata, is closely connected with the act of respira- 
