In relation to solid and savorous bodies, it is necessary in the first place for the teeth to divide them, that the saliva and other tasting fluids to imbibe them, and that the tongue press them against the palate, so as to express a juice, which, when sufficiently saturated by the degastory tendrils, deliver to the substance the passport it requires for admission into the stomach.

This system, which will yet receive other developments, replies without effort to the principal questions which may present themselves.

If we demand what is understood by sapid bodies, we reply that it is every thing that has flavor, which is soluble, and fit to be absorbed by the organ of taste.

If asked how a sapid body acts, we reply that it acts when it is reduced to such a state of dissolution that it enters the cavities made to receive it.

In a word, nothing is sapid but what is already or nearly dissolved.

Flavors.

The number of flavors is infinite, for every soluble body has a peculiar flavor, like none other.

Flavors are also modified by their simple, double, or multiple aggregation.  It is impossible to make any description, either of the most pleasant or of the most unpleasant, of the raspberry or of colocynth.  All who have tried to do so have failed.

This result should not amaze us, for being gifted with an infinite variety of simple flavors, which mixture modifies to such a number and to such a quantity, a new language would he needed to express their effects, and mountains of folios to describe them.  Numerical character alone could label them.

Now, as yet, no flavor has ever been appreciated with rigorous exactness, we have been forced to be satisfied with a limited number of expressions such as sweet, sugary, acid, bitter, and similar ones, which, when ultimately analyzed, are expressed by the two following agreeable and disagreeable, which suffice to make us understood, and indicate the flavor of the sapid substances referred to.

Those who come after us will know more, for doubtless chemistry will reveal the causes or primitive elements of flavors.

Influence of smelling on the taste.

The order I marked out for myself has insensibly led me to the moment to render to smell the rights which belong to it, and to recognise the important services it renders to taste and the application of flavors.  Among the authors I have met with, I recognise none as having done full justice to it.

For my own part, I am not only persuaded that without the interposition of the organs of smell, there would be no complete degustation, and that the taste and the sense of smell form but one sense, of which the mouth is the laboratory and the nose the chimney; or to speak more exactly, that one tastes tactile substances, and the other exhalations.