n. It should
follow that insects, which breathe through holes in their sides, cannot
have noses, and this is the truth.

Fishes, too, though they may have snouts, have not noses, because they
breathe by gills. In truth, it seems that the nose was a very late and
high acquisition, almost the finishing touch of the perfected animal
form. And incidentally this leads us to notice what a great step was
taken in evolution when the breathing holes were brought up to the
region of the mouth. For the sense of taste is necessarily situated in
the mouth, and the sense of smell is in close alliance with it. The
mouth tastes food dissolved in the saliva during the process of
mastication, and the primary use of the sense of smell is to detect and
analyse beforehand the small particles given off by food and floating in
the atmosphere.

A good many years ago, when the late Sally chimpanzee was the darling of
the Zoological Gardens in Regent's Park, I watched her eating dates. She
was an epicure, and always peeled each date delicately with her
preposterous lips before eating it, and during the process she would
apply the date to her nose every second to test its quality or enjoy its
aroma. The action was indescribably comical, but what would it have been
if her nostrils had been situated among her ribs? Imagine a mantis, for
example, as he chews up a fly, lifting one of his wings and applying it
to his flanks to see if it smells gamey. That is where some naturalists
believe that the sense of smell is situated in insects. Others, however,
think, with reason, that it is in the antennae or mouth. Nobody knows;
the senses of the lower animals seem to be stuck about all parts of the
body.

But, even if the sense of smell is at the mouth, how limited must its
usefulness be when it can only deal with substances that are held to it!
A new era dawned when the passages by which the breath of life
unceasingly comes and goes were transferred to the region of the mouth
also. The nerves of smell quickly spread themselves over the lining
membrane of those passages and became warders of the gate, challenging
every waft of air that entered the body and examining what it carried.
Thenceforth this region comprising the mouth, nostrils and surrounding
parts holds a new and high place in the economy of the body, for the
headquarters of the intelligence department are located there, and all
the faculties of the brain converge on that point. Of course, the