In trying to ascertain by experiment how far smell, touch, and temperature enter into this compound sensation, popularly known as "taste," it is best to make use of the pungent condiments. Mustard and horse-radish, for example, have little or no taste, but reserve their pungent effect for the mucous membrane of the nose during expiration. It is an advantage to know this, for if care is taken to breathe only through the mouth, we need no longer prepare to shed tears every time we help ourselves to the mustard. The pungent quality of mustard, the fiery quality of ginger, and the cool sensation in the mouth after eating peppermint, are due to the nerves of touch and temperature, which are commonly classed as one sense, though they are quite as distinct sensations as sight and hearing, or taste and smell.... There are two ways in which the effort to extract all its fragrance from a morsel of food confers a benefit. (1.) It is necessary to keep the morsel in the mouth as long as possible. Now the habit thus formed of eating very slowly is of the utmost importance, for if farinaceous articles of food are swallowed before the saliva has had time to act on them, they are little better than so much waste material taken into the system; and if meat is not thoroughly masticated, the stomach is overloaded with work which should have been done by the teeth; the result, in either case, is dyspepsia. It has been suggested that Mr. Gladstone owes his remarkable physical vigor to certain rules for chewing food, which he adopted in 1848, and to which he has adhered ever since. "He had always," we are told, "paid great attention to the requirements of Nature, but he then laid down as a rule for his children that thirty-two bites should be given to each mouthful of meat, and a somewhat lesser number to bread, fish, etc."