Not one of 100 people over fifty years of age could understand conversational speech at a distance of sixteen meters; 10.5% understood it at a distance of eight to sixteen meters. Of school children 46.5% (1918 of them) from seven to eighteen understood it at a distance of 20 meters plus, and 32.7% at a distance of from 16 to 8 meters. The percentage then is 10.5 for people over fifty as against 79.2 of people over seven and under 18. Old women can hear better than old men. At a distance of 4 to 16 meters the proportion of women to men who could hear was 34 to 17. The converse is true of children, for at a distance of 20 meters and more the percentage of boys was 49.9 and girls 48.2. The reason for this inversion of the relation lies in the harmful influences of manual labor and other noisy occupations of men. These comparisons may be of importance when the question is raised as to how much more a witness may have heard than one of a different age. Section 41. (d) The Sense of Taste. The sense of taste is rarely of legal importance, but when it does come into importance it is regularly very significant because it involves, in the main, problems of poisoning. The explanation of such cases is rarely easy and certain--first of all, because we can not, without difficulty, get into a position of testing the delicacy and acuteness of any individual sense of taste, where such testing is quite simple with regard to seeing and hearing. At the same time, it is necessary when tests are made, to depend upon general, and rarely constant impressions, since very few people mean the same thing by, stinging, prickly, metallic, and burning tastes, even though the ordinary terms sweet, sour, bitter, and salty, may be accepted as approximately constant. The least that can be done when a taste is defined as good, bad, excellent, or disgusting, is to test it in every possible direction with regard to the age, habits, health, and intelligence of the taster, for all of these exercise great influence on his values. Similarly necessary are valuations like flat, sweetish, contractile, limey, pappy, sandy, which are all dictated by almost momentary variations in well-being. But if any denotation is to be depended upon, and in the end some one has to be, it is necessary to determine whether the perception has been made with the end or the root of the tongue.[184] Longet, following the experiments of certain others, has brought together definite results in the following table: