Hot and cold require more discussion. The elementary sensations are warmth and coolness, rather than hot and cold. Hot and cold are painful, and the fact is that strong temperature stimuli arouse the pain spots as well as the warmth or cold spots. Hot, accordingly, is a sensation compounded of warmth and pain, and cold a sensation composed of coolness and pain. More than this, when a cold spot is touched with a point heated well above the skin temperature (best to a little over 100 Fahrenheit), the curious fact is noted that the cold spot responds with its normal sensation of cold. This is called the "paradoxical cold sensation". From this fact it is probable that a hot object excites the cold sensation, along with those of warmth and {199} pain; so that the sensation of heat is a blend of the three. Another curious fact is that a very cold object produces a burning sensation indistinguishable from that of a hot object; so that the sensation of great cold, like that of heat, is probably a blend of the three elementary sensations of warmth, cold and pain. [Illustration: Fig. 32.--Diagram of various sorts of sensory end-organ found in the skin. A is a hair end-organ; the sensory axons can be seen coiling around the root of the hair; evidently a touch on the hair, outside, would squeeze the coiled axon and stimulate it. The hair is a bit of "accessory apparatus." B is a touch corpuscle, consisting of a coiled axon-end surrounded by a little cone of other tissue. C is an end-bulb, presumably belonging to the temperature sense. It has, again, a coiled axon-end surrounded by other tissue. The "coils" are really much more finely branched than the diagram shows. D is a free-branched nerve end, consisting simply of a branched axon, with no accessory apparatus. It is the pain-sense organ. E is a corpuscle of a type found in the subcutaneous tissue, as well as in more interior parts of the body. It contains an axon-end surrounded by a layered capsule.] The stimulus that arouses the touch sensation is a bending of the skin. That which arouses warmth or cold is of {200} course a temperature stimulus, but, strange as it may seem, the exact nature of the effective stimulus has not been agreed upon. Either it is a warming or cooling of the skin, or it is the existence of a higher or lower temperature in the skin than that to which the skin is at the moment "adapted". This matter will become clearer when we later discuss adaptation. The stimulus that arouses the pain sensation may be mechanical (as a needle prick), or thermal (heat or cold), or chemical (as the drop of acid), or electrical; but in any case it must be strong enough to injure or nearly to injure the skin. In other words, the pain sense organ is not highly sensitive, but requires a fairly strong stimulus; and thus it is fitted to give warning of stimuli that threaten injury.