Why Do We Say that Sugar is Sweet?
This is a question which can be answered in a way, yet can not be really answered at all. We know that there is a certain well- marked part of the surface of the brain which is the real seat of the sense of taste. From, or to, this place there run at least four, perhaps more, sets of nerves, the ends of which are in the “taste bulbs” of the tongue and part of the throat. One set of these nerves, when it is excited, arouses in the brain the feeling which we call a sweet taste, and the thing which specially excites this particular set of nerves is sugar.
But no one has the least idea why sugar should not taste salt, or why salt should not taste sweet or bitter; nor is there any imaginable way of describing a sweet, a salt, or, bitter or acid taste to anyone who does not know these tastes. We can not even know that other people taste sugar or anything else just as we do.
Sugar is really a name for a closely related group of chemical substances all of which are sweet-tasting, though some are less so than others - for instance, milk sugar. But saccharin, which some people use instead of sugar, is utterly different from sugar chemically, yet it is sweeter than any sugar.
