A Text-book of Entomology: Including the Anatomy, Physiology, Embryology and Metamorphoses of Insects for Use in Agricultural and Technical Schools and Colleges as Well as by the Working EntomologistPackard, A. S. (Alpheus Spring)
Science
A Text-book of Entomology: Including the Anatomy, Physiology, Embryology and Metamorphoses of Insects for Use in Agricultural and Technical Schools and Colleges as Well as by the Working Entomologist
Packard, A. S. (Alpheus Spring)
Insects
Lesser, Roesel, Lyonet, Bonnet, and others expressed the same
opinion. Before this Sulzer suggested that an “unknown sense” might
exist in the antennæ; others regarded the stigmata as organs of
smell, as these were considered the natural passages for the
olfactory currents. Duméril, in two special treatises as well as in
his Considérations générales, sought to prove the theory as to the
seat of the organs of smell in the stigmata.
Against both of these leading views as to the seat of the sense of
smell were expressed, in the last century, different opinions. Thus
Comparetti thought that the sense of smell might be localized in
very different points of the head, in the antennal club of
lamellicorns, in the sucking-tube of Lepidoptera, in special frontal
holes of flies and Orthoptera, etc., while Bonsdorf considered the
palpi as organs of smell.
Thus four different views, confused, were held at the opening of
this century; the Hamburg zoölogist, M. C. S. Lehrman, in three
different treatises, brought together all the hitherto known
observations and arguments, treated them critically, and completed
them by his own extended studies. Lehrman adopted the opinions of
Reimarus, Baster, Duméril, and Schelver, that the stigmata presented
the most convenient place for the site of the organs of smell.
Cuvier followed throughout the lead of Lehrman, but Latreille
returned to the view of the perception of smell by the antennæ,
while Treviranus considered the mouth of arthropods as the probable
site of the sense of smell, an opinion which, before his time,
Huber, in his experiments on bees, had thought to be correct. Marcel
de Serres (1811) returned again to the palpi, and asserted—at least
in the Orthoptera—their functions to be olfactory, while Blainville,
ten years later, again expressed anew the old opinion that the
antennæ, or at least their terminations, were organs of smell. Up to
that date there was an uncertainty as to the seat of the organs both
of smell and hearing. Fabricius, indeed, had already, in 1783,
thought he had found an organ of hearing at the base of the outer
antenna. In 1826 J. Müller mentioned an already well-known organ in
the abdomen of crickets as an organ of hearing. Müller, however, was
doubtful, from the fact that the nerve passing to this organ arose,
not from the brain, but from the third thoracic ganglion; but,
notwithstanding, he remarks: “Perhaps we have not found the organ of
hearing in insects because we sought for it in the head.” This
discovery was afterwards considerably broadened and extended by
Siebold’s work, for the views of these naturalists on the seat of
both organs had a definite influence, especially in Germany. For
awhile, indeed, Müller’s hypothesis stood in complete contradiction,
so that during the following decennial was presented anew the
picture of opposing observations and opinions as to the nature of
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