Birds and all Nature, Vol. V, No. 1, January 1899

We give the sense of taste more credit sometimes than it merits. What we regard as tastes are often flavors or only smells. What is taken in at the mouth gets to the nose by the back way if it is of the nature of most spices, and so by use of the nose and the imagination we taste things that do not affect the tongue at all. A cold in the head shows us we do not taste cinnamon, we merely experience its pungency as it smarts the tongue while its flavor we enjoy only with the nose.

With some substances we have a mixed experience that passes for taste, but it is really a combination of taste, smell, and touch. With the nostrils held one can scarcely distinguish between small quantities of pure water and the same with a very little essence of cloves. The difference is easily observed with the nostrils open or after swallowing, for the odor of the mixture gets readily into the nose from either direction.

It is curious to note that, although there are so many varieties of taste, man has but few words to describe them with. We know the taste of a thousand substances, and yet we are in nowise superior to the veriest savage in the matter of speaking about their flavors. We are obliged to speak in the same manner as the wild man of the forest and say that a given taste is like the taste of some other thing, only different.

One of the lowest forms of tongues is that of the gasteropod. All snails and slugs are gasteropods. They have instead of a regular tongue a strip that is called a lingual ribbon, one end of which is free and the other fastened to the floor of the mouth. Across the ribbon from left to right run rows of hard projections almost like teeth. Whatever the mouth comes against is tested for food qualities by this rasping ribbon which files away at the substance and wears away not only what it works upon but the ribbon itself. This loss of tongue is no serious affair to the gasteropod, for he finds his tongue growing constantly like a finger-nail and he needs to work diligently at his trade or suffer from undue proportions of the unruly member. Snails in an aquarium gnaw the green slime from the sides of the vessel with their lingual ribbons, and the process may be seen to more or less advantage at times.

Taste is not all confined to tongues. Some people have papillæ on the inside of the cheek. Medusae (Jelly Fish) have no tongues, but the qualities of the sea-water are noted by them. As soon as rain begins to fall into the sea they proceed directly towards the bottom, showing a decided aversion to having their water thinned in any way.

Leeches show their powers of distinguishing tastes when they take in sweetened water quite freely, but suck at the skin of a sick man much less than at that of one in good health.

Taste in insects has its probable seat in many instances in a pair of short horns or feelers back of the antennæ. These are constantly moving over the parts of that which the insect is feeding upon, and so apparently enjoyable is the motion of them that many scientists have concluded that these are the taste organs of the insects having them. At the same time it is quite probable that in all insects furnished with salivary glands, a proboscis, or a tongue, the power of taste is also or exclusively there.

Fishes seem to do most of their tasting somewhere down in the stomach, for they pursue their prey voraciously and frequently swallow it whole. With their gristly gums, in many cases almost of the toughness of leather, there can be but little sensation of taste. Their equally hard tongues, many times fairly bristling with teeth constructed for capturing, but not for chewing, cannot possibly afford much of a taste of what is going down the throat with the rushing water passing through the open mouth and gills.

Serpents which swallow their food alive can get but little taste of their victims as they pass over the tongue, although they are deliberate in the act and cover them with a profusion of saliva.

It is quite possible that cattle in chewing the cud get the highest enjoyment possible from this sense. They enjoy their food at the first grasp of it, and prove it by their persistence in struggling for certain roots and grasses, but their calm delight afterwards as they lie in the shade and bring up from the recesses of their separate stomachs the choice and somewhat seasoned pellets of their morning's gleanings is an indication of their refined enjoyment of the pleasures of this sense.

Sir John Lubbock calls attention to the remarkable instances of certain insects in which the foods of the perfect insect and of the larvæ are quite different. The mother has to find and select for her offspring food which she would not herself touch. "Thus while butterflies and moths feed on honey, each species selects some particular food plant for the larvæ. Again flies, which also enjoy honey themselves, lay their eggs on putrid meat and other decaying animal substances."

Forel seems to have found that certain insects smell with their antennæ, but do not taste with them. He gave his ants honey mixed with strychnine and morphine. The smell of the honey attracted them and they followed what seemed to be the bidding of their antennæ, but the instant the honey with its medication touched their lips they abandoned the stuff.

Will fed wasps with crystals of sugar till they came regularly for it. Then he substituted grains of alum for the sugar. They came and began their feast as usual, but soon their sense of taste told them there was some mistake and they retired vigorously rubbing their mouth parts to take away the puckering sensation of the alum.

Cigar smokers who really enjoy the weed confess that they cannot tell except by sight when the cigar goes out. In the dark they keep right on drawing air through the cigar, and the pleasure of the smoke seems to be in nowise diminished after the cigar is out unless the smoker discovers he has no light. This seems to show that the sense of taste has little to do with the pleasure of smoking.

Tongues are used in tasting, seizing food, assisting the teeth to chew, covering the food with saliva, swallowing, and talking. Man and the monkey, having hands to grasp food, do not use their tongues for this purpose. The giraffe does so much reaching and straining after food in the branches of trees that his tongue has become by long practice a deft instrument for grasping. The woodpecker uses his tongue as a spear, and the anteater runs his long tongue into the nest of a colony of ants, so as to catch large numbers of the little insects on its sticky surface.

Cats and their kind have a peculiarity in that instead of having cone-shaped papillæ their tongues are covered with sharp spines of great strength. These are used in combing the fur and in scraping bones.

Two characteristic accomplishments of man would not be his if it were not for his versatile tongue; they are spitting and whistling. The drawing of milk in nursing is an act of the tongue, and the power of its muscles as well as the complete control of its movements is an interesting provision of nature. It is believed by some that the pleasures of the taste sense are confined to such animals as suckle their young.

Tongues are rough because the papillæ, which in ordinary skin are hidden beneath the surface, come quite through and stand up like the villi of the digestive canal. The red color of the tongue is due to the fact that the papillæ are so thinly covered that the blood circulating within shows through.

THE MOUNTAIN LION

THIS is only one of the names by which the puma (Felis concolor) is known in the United States. He has different local names, such as tiger, cougar, catamount and panther, or "painter," as the backwoodsmen entitle him, and silvery lion.

The puma ranges the whole of both the Americas from the Straits of Magellan to where the increasing cold in the north of Canada blocks his passage. Like many other large animals, however, the puma has retired before the advance of civilization, and in many of the more thickly populated portions of the United States a straggler, even, is rarely to be found.

The haunts of the puma depend upon the nature of the country. In sections well-wooded he decidedly prefers forests to plains; but his favorite spots are edges of forests and plains grown with very high grass. He always selects for his abode such spots as afford some shelter, in the vicinity of rocks which have caverns for secure concealment, and in which to bring forth his young. He spends the day sleeping on trees, in bushes, or in the high grass; in the evening and at night he goes forth to hunt. He sometimes covers great distances in a single night, and sportsmen do not always find him near the place where he struck down his prey.

All smaller, weak mammals are his prey – deer, sheep, colts, calves, and small quadrupeds generally. When, however, his prey is so large that it cannot all be devoured at one meal, the animal covers it with leaves or buries it in the earth, returning later to finish his repast. This habit is sometimes taken advantage of by his human enemy, who, poisoning the hidden carcass with strychnine, often manages to secure the lion when he comes back to eat it. The use of poison against these and other carnivorous animals by the farmer and stock-raiser has become so general in the West they are rapidly becoming exterminated. If it were not for some such means of defense as this, the sheep-raisers and cattle-growers would be quite powerless to protect their herds from the attacks of the mountain lion and other beasts of prey.

The puma is a very bloodthirsty animal, and whether hungry or not, usually attacks every animal, excepting dogs, that comes in his way. When hungry, however, he disdains no sort of food, feeding even upon the porcupine, notwithstanding the quills which lacerate his mouth and face, or the skunk, heedless of that little animal's peculiar venom. Ordinarily the puma will not attack man, fleeing, indeed, from him when surprised, but he has been known when emboldened by hunger to make such attacks. He, of course, sometimes kills the hunter who has wounded him, though even then, by the cautious, he is little feared; but an unprovoked assault, such as the mangling of a woman in Pennsylvania in the eighties, is rare.

It is the habit of the puma to spring upon his prey from an eminence such as a ledge of rocks, a tree, or a slight rise of ground. If he fails to strike his victim, he seldom pursues it for any considerable distance. In northern regions, however, he sometimes pursues the deer when they are almost helpless in the deep snow. When he has seized his victim, he tears open its neck, and laps its blood before he begins to eat. He devours every part of a small animal, but the larger ones he eats only in part – the head, neck, and shoulders – burying the rest.

Very young cubs when captured soon become thoroughly tamed, enjoying the liberty of a house like a dog. When petted they purr like cats and manifest their affection in much the same manner. When displeased they growl, but a roar has never been heard from them. There is one drawback to a tame puma, however, says Brehm. When he has great affection for his master and likes to play with him, he hides at his approach and unexpectedly jumps on him. One can imagine how startling and uncomfortable would be such an ill-timed caress. An old puma, when captured, sometimes rejects all food, preferring starvation to the loss of liberty.

Every movement of the puma is full of grace and vigor; he is said to make leaps of eighteen feet or more. His sight is keenest in the dusk and by night; his sense of smell is deficient but his hearing is extremely acute.

The lair in which the female brings forth her young is usually in a shallow cavern on the face of some inaccessible cliff or ledge of rocks.

In the southern states, Audubon says, where there are no caves or rocks, the lair of the puma is generally in a very dense thicket or in a canebrake. It is a rude sort of bed of sticks, weeds, leaves and grasses. The number of cubs is from two to five. In captivity two usually are born, but sometimes only one.

THE HOLLY TREE

O reader! hast thou ever stood to see
The Holly tree?
The eye that contemplates it, well perceives
Its glossy leaves,
Ordered by an intelligence so wise
As might confound the atheist's sophistries.

Below a circling fence its leaves are seen
Wrinkled and keen;
No grazing cattle through their prickly round
Can reach to wound;
But as they grow where nothing is to fear,
Smooth and unarmed the pointless leaves appear.

I love to view these things with curious eyes,
And moralize;
And in this wisdom of the Holly tree
Can emblem see
Wherewith perchance to make a pleasant rhyme,
One which may profit in the after-time.

Thus, though abroad perchance I might appear
Harsh and austere,
To those who on my leisure would intrude
Reserved and rude,
Gentle at home amid my friends I'd be
Like the high leaves upon the Holly tree.

And should my youth, as youth is apt, I know,
Some harshness show,
All vain asperities I day by day
Would wear away,
Till the smooth temper of my age should be
Like the high leaves upon the Holly tree.

And as when all the summer trees are seen
So bright and green,
The Holly leaves a sober hue display
Less bright than they,