taste-beaker

Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia

1. n. A taste-bud or taste-bulb; the end-organ of taste. Taste-beakers are oval bodies, formed of long fusiform cells which are arranged in cortical and medullary groups; the latter, into the one pole of which nerve-fibres have been traced, project through an opening left at the opposite pole between the cortical cells. They are most prominently distributed along the sides of the trenches round the circumvallate papillæ. E. B. Titchener, Exper. Psychol., I. i. 64.