then may mean that the body as a whole will cool off to the point of actual injury. It is better to feel cold and conserve the body’s heat than to feel warm and waste it. [Illustration: TASTE BUDS (From Martin’s “Human Body”)] The last of the contact senses is that of taste. This is found only on the tongue. Scattered about on that organ are many tiny sense organs known as taste buds. These are usually in little hollows, so they cannot be affected unless liquids which can enter the hollows are on the surface of the tongue. If the tongue is wiped dry and then dry sugar is sprinkled on it, no sweet taste will develop so long as the dryness continues. The purpose of taste is evidently to give final information about the food after it has passed the inspection of the other senses and has been inserted into the mouth, but before it is swallowed. In the higher animals there has been a subdivision of this sense into two. The other is the sense of smell. In large part smell is a distance sense, and will be treated when we are talking about the distance senses. Smell has monopolized most of the properties of food-judging, so there is left for taste proper only four kinds of perception. These are sweet, sour, salty and bitter. We have, apparently, four kinds of taste buds, one for each of these kinds of taste. All the other sensations that we call taste are flavors, and are really smells. Of the four tastes sour and bitter would probably be called warning and sweet and salty recommending. Only by practice do we come to care for bitter foods, and children usually object just as strongly to those that are sour. Tropical savages, for whom salt is a rarity, esteem it much more highly than sugar, which they can usually get in abundance. In concluding this chapter we need to remember that the contact senses make up the court of last resort; by the time anything comes close enough to the body to act upon any of them it is so close that the effect in guiding the muscles must be immediate; there is no time for deliberation; whatever the muscles are going to do in response to information thus obtained must be done at once. Later we shall see how this affects our whole bodily make-up. CHAPTER IX SENSATION--DISTANCE SENSES