Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 15.djvu/108

 are turned not toward, but away from, the light; and the latter has to traverse the layer of nervous tissues with which their outer ends are connected, before it can affect them. Moreover, the rods and cones of the vertebrate retina are so deeply seated, and in many respects so peculiar in character, that it appears impossible, at first sight, that they can have anything to do with that epidermis of which gustatory and tactile, and at any rate the lower forms of auditory and visual, organs are obvious modifications.

Whatever be the apparent diversities among the sensiferous apparatuses, however, they share certain common characters. Each consists of a receptive, a transmissive, and a sensificatory portion. The essential part of the first is an epithelium, of the second, nerve-fibers, of the third, a part of the brain; the sensation is always the consequence of the mode of motion excited in the receptive, and sent along the transmissive, to the sensorial part of the sensiferous apparatus. And, in all the senses, there is no likeness whatever between the object of sense, which is matter in motion, and the sensation, which is an immaterial phenomenon.

On the hypothesis which appears to me to be the most convenient, sensation is a product of the sensiferous apparatus caused by certain modes of motion which are set up in it by impulses from without. The sensiferous apparatuses are, as it were, factories, all of which at the one end receive raw materials of a similar kind—namely, modes of motion—while at the other each turns out a special product, the feeling which constitutes the kind of sensation characteristic of it.

Or, to make use of a closer comparison, each sensiferous apparatus is comparable to a musical box wound up, with as many tunes as there are separate sensations. The object of a simple sensation is the agent which presses down the stop of one of these tunes, and the more feeble the agent, the more delicate must be the mobility of the stop.

But, if this be the case, if the recipient part of the sensiferous apparatus is in all cases merely a mechanism affected by coarser or finer kinds of material motion, we might expect to find that all sense-organs are fundamentally alike, and result from the modification of the same morphological elements. And this is exactly what does result from all recent histological and embryological investigations.

It has been seen that the receptive part of the olfactory apparatus is a slightly modified epithelium, which lines an olfactory chamber deeply seated between the orbits in adult human beings. But, if we trace back the nasal chambers to their origin in the embryo, we find that, to begin with, they are mere depressions of the skin of the forepart of the head, lined by a continuation of the general epidermis. These depressions become pits, and the pits, by the growth of the adjacent parts, gradually acquire the position which they finally occupy.