Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 15.djvu/107

 in the mechanism of touch is unknown. If they are sense-organs, they are exceptional in character, in so far as they do not appear to be modifications of the epidermis. Nothing is known respecting the sense-organs of those sensations of resistance which are grouped under the head of the muscular sense; nor of the sensations of warmth and cold; nor of that very singular sensation which we call tickling.

In the case of heat and cold, the organism not only becomes affected by external bodies, far more remote than those which affect the sense of smell, but the Democritic hypothesis is obviously no longer permissible. When the direct rays of the sun fall upon the skin, the sensation of heat is certainly not caused by "attenuated films" thrown off from that luminary, but to a mode of motion which is transmitted to us. In Aristotelian phrase, it is the form without the matter of the sun which stamps the sense-organ; and this, translated into modern language, means nearly the same thing as Hartley's vibrations. Thus we are prepared for what happens in the case of the auditory and the visual senses. For neither the ear nor the eye receives anything but the impulses or vibrations originated by sonorous or luminous bodies. Nevertheless, the receptive apparatus still consists of nothing but specially modified epithelial cells. In the labyrinth of the ear of the higher animals the free ends of these cells terminate in excessively delicate hairlike filaments; while, in the lower forms of auditory organ, its free surface is beset with delicate hairs like those of the surface of the body, and the transmissive nerves are connected with the bases of these hairs. Thus there is an insensible gradation in the forms of the receptive apparatus, from the organ of touch, on the one hand, to those of taste and smell; and, on the other hand, to that of hearing. Even in the case of the most refined of all the sense-organs, that of vision, the receptive apparatus departs but little from the general type. The only essential constituent of the visual sense-organ is the retina, which forms so small a part of the eyes of the higher animals; and the simplest eyes are nothing but portions of the integument, in which the cells of the epidermis have become converted into glassy, rod-like retinal corpuscles. The outer ends of these are turned toward the light; their sides are more or less extensively coated with a dark pigment, and their inner ends are connected with the transmissive nerve-fibers. The light impinging on these visual rods produces a change in them which is communicated to the nerve-fibers, and, being transmitted to the sensorium, gives rise to the sensation—if indeed all animals which possess eyes are endowed with what we understand as sensation.

In the higher animals, a complicated apparatus of lenses, arranged on the principle of a camera obscura, serves at once to concentrate and to individualize the pencils of light proceeding from external bodies. But the essential part of the organ of vision is still a layer of cells which have the form of rods with truncated or conical ends. By what seems a strange anomaly, however, the glassy ends of these