A Handbook of Psychology (Paperback, UK ed.)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II. THE SPECIAL SENSES. THESE are what are called the five senses. They are here, for a reason that will be afterwards explained, taken up in the following order: ?taste, smell, touch, hearing, sight. In the account of each we shall follow the order already adopted in treating of sensation in gen- eral; we shall describe (i) the organ, (2) the substances or agencies by which the organ is excited, (3) the sensations which result from such excitation. i.?Taste. (A.) The organ of this sense is situated in the back of the mouth. The most important parts of the organ are the posterior region of the upper surface of the tongue, and the soft palate, that is, the posterior portion of the palate. But the adjoining structures, called the pillars of the soft palate and the tonsils, are also sensitive to taste. The gustative sensibility of the palate has impressed itself on ordinary language in the use of the word palate for taste, not only as a noun, but, formerly, also as a verb, and in the verbal adjective palatable. Not palating the taste of her dishonour. Troilus and Cressida, Act iv., Sc. I. (B.) Sapid 'substances, as belonging to the physical world, form a subject of investigation for the physical sciences. It is for the chemist especially to trace the constituent of any substance, on which its taste depends. It may be sufficient here to notice merely two facts about sapid bodies, ?one referring to their physical condition, the other to their chemical character. The first is, that they must all be either liquids or solids in a state of solution; it is, in fact, a familiar experience of every-day life, that a dry substance remains incapable of affecting taste till it has been moistened or dissolved in the mouth. The other fact with regard to sapid bodie...