Attempts have been made to determine whether these elementary taste qualities depend on separate taste buds or papillæ. Experiments show it to be true that some points respond only to sweet, sour, etc. But there are others which yield two or three or even all four qualities, while some yield no taste at all. In one such experiment thirty-nine papillæ, in a certain region, were separately stimulated by acid, sugar, salt, and quinine. Of these thirty-nine, thirty-one responded to salt, and the same number to sweet, twenty-nine to sour, twenty-one to bitter. Four yielded no taste at all, one responded only to bitter, and one to sweet. In another case of one hundred and twenty-five papillæ examined by solutions of sugar, quinine, and tartaric acid, sixty gave sensations of all three qualities (sweet, sour, bitter), twelve gave both sweet and sour, twelve sour only, seven bitter and sour, four bitter and sweet, and three sweet only. None of them seemed to give a bitter quality alone and this seems to be the general rule. It is of course difficult in these experiments to restrict the application of the stimulus to single taste buds or even to single papillæ. But these experiments, along with the effects of drugs which we have already described, suggest that the taste buds are not all alike in function, even though they seem quite similar so far as appearance and structure are concerned. _The Vocabulary of Taste_ Several investigators have been interested in the study of the taste names found in different languages and communities. It has been suggested that such a study might throw light on the order of development of the various taste qualities. Kiesow found that both children and adults quite commonly confused bitter with salt and sour. Myers found, in studying the taste names of primitive people in the region of the Torres Straits, that they had no word for bitter. In some primitive languages the same word is used for sweet and salt. When there is a word for salt it is usually some derivative of the word for sea water. Salt and sour are also often confused. In Polynesia, indeed, a single word is used in describing salt, sour, and bitter tastes. This is analogous to the fact that in primitive languages it is often found that the same word is used to indicate blue and black. Attempts to argue from these facts of vocabulary to facts of sensitiveness and order of development are, of course, open to many sources of error. As Myers points out, “The differences between sour and bitter are considered less striking than their common unpalatability.” It has often been pointed out that in our own language sweet is probably the only taste word that had from its very origin a gustatory meaning. In some languages even the word for sweet means literally “tasting good.”