Transcriber’s Note:

The cover image was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.

AROMATICS AND THE SOUL

DISEASES OF

THE THROAT, NOSE,

AND EAR

By Dan McKenzie, M.D., F.R.C.S.E. Royal 8vo. 650 pages. 2 Coloured Plates and 198 Illustrations. 42s. net.

Times Literary Supplement.—“There is probably no better book on this branch of medicine and surgery in existence.”

LONDON

WILLIAM HEINEMANN

(MEDICAL BOOKS) LTD.

AROMATICS AND THE SOUL
A STUDY OF SMELLS

BY

DAN McKENZIE, M.D. (Glasg.)

FELLOW OF THE ROYAL COLLEGE OF SURGEONS, EDINBURGH

“Natura rerum quae sit odoribus intenta sunt....”

Q. Horatii Flacci Carminum, Lib. V.

“There are whose study is of smells”

R. Kipling’s version of the same

LONDON

WILLIAM HEINEMANN

(MEDICAL BOOKS) LTD.

1923

INSCRIBED TO

Dr. V. H. WYATT WINGRAVE

IN ADMIRATION

OF

AN INDOMITABLE SPIRIT

Printed in Great Britain.

PREFACE

Having, as I thought, completed this book—bar the Preface, which is, of course, always the last chapter—I sent it in manuscript to an old friend of mine for his opinion.

He let me have it.

“Your brochure,” he wrote, “is remarkable more perhaps for what it omits than for what it contains. For example, there is no mention whatever made of the vomero-nasal organ, or organ of Jacobson.”

Then, after drastically sweeping away the much that seems to him redundant in the body of the work, he closes his general criticism (which I omit) with “I should like to have heard your views on the vomero-nasal organ. Parker devotes a whole chapter to it.”

A carpenter, according to the adage, is known by his chips. And it was by the simple removal of some superfluous marble, as everyone knows, that the Venus of Milo was revealed to the world—which is only another way of saying the same thing.

But what sort of a carpenter is he who leaves among his chips the mouldings of his door? And what should we say of the sculptor, even in these days, who would treat as a superfluity his lady’s chin?

No mention of the vomero-nasal or Jacobson’s organ! A serious, nay! a damning, defect.

So here am I trying to atone for the sin of omission by giving the neglected item place of honour in my Preface. “The stone which the builders rejected....”

But my motive for erecting it here, in the gateway to my little pagoda of the perfumes, is not quite so simple as I am pretending. The fact is that in my capacity as creator I predetermined, I actually foredained, the omission from my text of the structure to which “Parker devotes a whole chapter.”

I am sorry in some ways. But as the Aberdeen minister so consolingly said: “There are many things the Creator does in His offeecial capacity that He would scorn to do as a private indiveedual.”

You see, I had a feeling about it. One of those feelings artists are subject to. (But a scientific writer an artist?—Certainly! Why not?)

I felt, to be quite frank, that if I were to interpolate a description and a discussion of this minutia my book would ... would.... Quite so. The artist will understand.

I came, in short, to look upon this “organ,” this nose within a nose, as a touchstone, so to speak. The thing became a Symbol.

But here we plunge head over heels into the Subjective, on the other side of which stream lie the misty shades of the Occult. For that is what happens to you when you begin talking about Symbols.

However, we shall not be crossing to the other side on this occasion, my symbolism being after all but a humdrum affair.—Merely this, that to me this organ of Jacobson is the symbol of the Exhaustive—of the minute, punctilious, unwearying, laboured comprehensiveness, Teutonic in its over and under and through, that characterises the genuine, the reliable, scientific treatise and renders it so desperately full of interest—to examinees.

Imagine, if you can, the indignation of kindly Sir Walter were the news ever to reach him in Valhalla that urchins now at school are not only forced to study his light-hearted romances as holiday tasks, but are actually examined upon them!

So, comparing small things with great, let me say: “Absit omen.”

My faith in the spoken charm of that phrase is, however, none too robust. Heaven helps the man who helps himself. And so, by way of reinforcing the Powers in their efforts to divert professorial attention from this essay of mine, I am leaving it, by a careful act of carelessness, incomplete.

Here, then, you have the real reason for my exclusion of the organ of Jacobson (and the like). It is merely a dodge to prevent the book ever becoming a task in any way, for any one, at any time.

He who runs may read herein, then, without slackening pace—or he may refrain from reading, just as he pleases, seeing that he can never be under the compulsion of remembering a single word I have written.

This, if I may say so, is, in my opinion, the only kind of book worth reading. At all events, it is the only kind I ever enjoy reading, and I say if a book is not enjoyable it is already placed upon the only Index Expurgatorius that is worth a ... an anathema.

D. M.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

AROMATICS AND THE SOUL

CHAPTER 1
OLFACTION AND PUBLIC HEALTH

I sing of smells, of scents, perfumes, odours, whiffs and niffs; of aromas, bouquets and fragrances; and also, though temperately and restrainedly I promise you, of effluvia, reeks, fœtors, stenches, and stinks.

A few years ago I stood before the public singing another song. By no means a service of praise it was, but something of the order of a denunciatory psalm, wherein I invoked the wrath of the high gods upon such miscreants as make life hideous with din.

You must not think that imprecations cannot be sung. All emotional utterance is song, said Carlyle; only he said it not quite so briefly. And, leaving on one side the vituperations of his enemies by King David (if he it was who wrote the Psalms) which we still chant upon certain days of the Christian year, it may be remembered that in bygone times when the medical practitioner was a wizard (or a witch) and uttered his (or her) spell to stay the arrows of Apollo, it not infrequently contained a denunciation of some brother (or sister) practitioner of the art (how times are changed!), and it was known, in Rome at all events, as a carmen, a song. Hence, say the etymologists, the English word “charm,” which still, of course, characterises the modern witch, if not the modern wizard—neither of whom, we may add, is nowadays a medical practitioner.

Besides, denunciations are, of course, grunted and growled with more or less of a semblance of singing in modern opera. To substantiate my words I need only mention that interminable scene—or is it an act?—of gloom and evil plottings by Telramund and Ortrud in Lohengrin.

But if I am again singing, this time, I trust, my voice will sound in the ears of my hearers less shrill, less strident, less of a shriek. For, in sooth, the present theme is one upon which we are justly entitled, in so far as England and Scotland at all events are concerned, to raise what would be a Nunc Dimittis of praise and thanksgiving, were it not that the price of cleanly air like that of liberty is eternal vigilance, seeing that our nostrils are no longer offended by the stenches our forefathers had to put up with. That they endured such offences philosophically, cheerfully even, laughing at the unpleasantness as men do at a bad smell, is true. Nevertheless most people in those days probably felt as much objection to a vile odour as Queen Elizabeth, for example, did, the sharpness of whose nose, her biographers tell us, was only equalled by the sharpness of her tongue.

Irishmen who do me the honour of tasting this light omelette of scientific literature will have noticed, I am sure, that I have not included the sister isle in my olfactory paradise. And indeed, I hesitated long before passing it over, because I am a man of peace—at any price where the Land of Ire is concerned. But alas! I am by nature truthful and only by art mendacious. And there sticks horrible to my memory the fumous and steamy stench of parboiled cabbage that filled the restaurant-car of the train for Belfast—yes! Belfast, not Dublin—one evening as I landed at Kingstown. The sea had been—well! it was the Irish Sea, and I stepped on to the train straight from the mail-boat, so that ... in a word, I remember that luscious but washy odour too vividly to bestow upon Ireland the white flower of a stenchless life.

In these remarks I have been careful to observe that the train was not the Dublin train, but if any one feels moved to defend the capital city, let him first of all take a stroll down by the Liffey as it flows fermenting and bubbling under its bridges, and then ... if he can....

Let me, however, in justice to that grief-stricken country, spray a little perfume over my too pungent observations. I can also recall after many years a warm and balmy evening in the town of Killarney, the peaceful close to a day of torrential rain. The setting sun, glowing love through its tears, was reddening the sky and the dark green hills around, those hills of Ireland where surely, if anywhere on this earth, heaven is foreshadowed. And linked in memory with that evening’s glory there comes, like the gentle strain of a long-forgotten song, the rich, pungent smell of turf-smoke eddying blue from low chimneys into the soft air of the twilight. Ireland! Ireland! What an atmosphere of love and grief that name calls up! Surely the surf that beats upon the strands of Innisfail far away is more salt, more bitter, and perhaps for that very reason more sweet, than the waters of any of the other beaches that ocean bathes!

Thence also comes a memory of heliotrope. It grew by a cottage just beyond a grey granite fishing-harbour in Dublin Bay, and brings also, with its faint, ineffable fragrance, the same inseparable blending of emotions that clings, itself a never-dying odour, to the memory of holidays in Ireland. There is a phrase in a song, simple, sentimental, even silly if you like, that prays for “the peace of mind dearer than all.”

“But what,” I remember asking the mother of our party—“what is meant by ‘peace of mind’?” Her wistful smile seemed to me to be a very inadequate reply to my question—which, by the way, I am still asking.

It is an historical fact that the movement which rendered England the pioneer country in the matter of Public Health received its first impulse from, and even now owes its continued existence to, the simple accident that the English public has grown intolerant of over-obtrusive odours. Stenches have attained to the dignity of a legal topic of interest, and are now by Act of Parliament become “nuisances” in law as well as in nature, with the result that they have been, for the most part, banished from the face of the land and the noses of its inhabitants.

The reason assigned by the man in the street for this reform was, and indeed still is, that stenches breed epidemic diseases. In a noisome smell people imagine a deadly pestilence, probably because patients affected with such epidemic diseases as smallpox, typhus, and diphtheria, give off nauseating odours. Now, bad smells from drains and cesspools do not of themselves induce epidemic disease. Nevertheless, there is this much of truth in the superstition, that where you have bad smells you have also surface accumulations of filth, and these, soaking through soil and subsoil, contaminate surface wells, until it only requires the advent of a typhoid or other “carrier” to set a widespread epidemic a-going. Further, as recent investigators have shown us, the loathsome and deadly typhus fever, known for years to be a “filth-disease,” is carried by lice, which pests breed and flourish where bodily cleanliness is neglected and personal odours are strong.

So that in this, as in most superstitions, there is a substratum of truth.

But the point is, that the objection to bad smells preceded all those scientific discoveries and had, in the beginning, but a slender support from rationalism. Our forebears builded better than they knew. Their objection was in reality intuitive. It may be true that all nations occupying a corresponding level of civilisation will manifest the same instinctive abhorrences, but it has been left to the practical genius of the English race to give effect to the natural repugnance and to translate its urgings into practice.

The interesting question now arises: How and when did this intuition or instinct, this blind feeling, arise, and what transformed it from a mere individual objection, voiced here and there, to a mass-movement leading to a general popular reformation?

The first explanation that is likely to occur to us is, that it was due to the refinement of feeling that accompanies high civilisation operating in a community quick to respond and to react when a public benefit is anticipated. One of the results of culture is an increase in the delicacy of the senses. When men and women strive after refinement, they achieve it, becoming refined, in spite of what pessimists and so-called realists preach, not only in their outward behaviour, but also in their innermost thoughts and feelings, and this internal refinement implies among other things a quickening of the sense of disgust. There is naturally a close and intimate connection between the sense of smell and the nerve-centres which, when stimulated, evoke the feeling of nausea in the mind—and the bodily acts that follow it. We are here dealing, in fact, with a primitive protective impulse to ensure that evil-smelling things shall not be swallowed, and the means adopted by Nature to prevent that ingestion, or, if it has accidentally occurred, to reverse it, are prompt. And successful. There is no compromise with the evil thing.

Like all other nerve-reactions, this particular reflex can be educated: either up or down. It can be blunted and degraded, or it can be rendered more acute, more prompt to react. Now, one of the effects of civilised life, of town life, is to abbreviate the period of all reflex action. And if this applies to knee-jerks and to seeing jokes, it is even more noticeable in the particular reflex we are here considering.

A citizen of Cologne in Coleridge’s days, for example, must have been anosmic to most of the seven-and-twenty stenches that offended the Englishman, and in my own time I have counted as many as ten objectionable public perfumes, yea! even in Lucerne, the “Lovely Lucerne” of the railway posters. Several of these, perhaps, did not amount to more than a mere whiff, just the suspicion of a something unpleasant, no more (but no less) disturbing than, say, one note a semitone flat in a major chord; two or three of them, however, to the sensitive, thin-winged organ of an English school-ma’am, would have attained to the rank of a “smell,” a word on her lips as emphatic as an oath on yours or mine; four of them, at the least, were plain stenches, and so beyond her vocabulary altogether; and one was—well! beyond even mine, but only too eloquent itself of something ugly and bloated, some mess becoming aerial just round the corner. I did not turn that corner.

Now, the people of Lucerne could never have smelled them, or at all events they could never have appreciated those perfumes as I did, or the town would have been evacuated. Their olfactory sense compared with mine must have been a stupid thing, dense to begin with, and cudgelled by use and wont into blank insensibility. Because, it is obvious, delicacy in this, as in all the senses, can only be acquired by avoiding habitual overstimulation. And that avoidance is only possible in a country where odours are fine, etherealised, rare.

Even in France, France the enlightened, the sensitive, the refined, primitive odours pervade the country, as our Army knows very well. Not only is the farm dunghill given place of honour in the farm courtyard, close to doors and windows, but even in the mansions of the wealthy the cesspool still remains—not outside, but inside, the house, the water-carriage system, even the pail-system (if that can be called a system), being unknown. So that our Army authorities had to send round a peculiar petrol-engine, known to the Tommies as “Stinking Willie,” to empty those pools of corruption. Some of the monasteries used by us as hospitals were, at the beginning of the war, even worse.

From this we may surmise that the olfactory sense of our neighbours is not yet so sensitive as is ours.

But in this matter Western Europe, at its worst—say, in one of the corridor-trains to Marseilles—is a mountain-top to a pigstye compared with the old and gorgeous East. “The East,” ejaculated an old Scotsman once—“the East is just a smell! It begins at Port Said and disna stop till ye come to San Francisco, ... if there!” he added after a pause. From his sweeping condemnation we must, however, exempt Japan.

Who can ever forget the bazaar smells of India, the mingled must and fust with its background of garlic and strange vices, or the still more mysterious atmospheres of China with their deep suggestion of musk?

Naturally the air of a cold country is clearer of obnoxious vapours than that of tropical and subtropical climes, but in spite of that, the first whiff of a Tibetan monastery, like that of an Eskimo hut, grips the throat, they say, like the air over a brewing vat.

So that, after making every allowance for the favour of Nature, we are still entitled to claim that the relative purity of England, and of English cities, towns and even villages, is an artificial achievement.

I may therefore, with justice, raise a song of praise to our fathers who have had our country thus swept and garnished, swept of noxious vapours and emanations, and garnished with the perfume of pure and fresh air, to the delight and invigoration of our souls.

And yet the change has only recently been brought about. Up to the beginning of the nineteenth century the city of London

“was certainly as foul as could be. The streets were unpaved or paved only with rough cobble stones. There were no side walks. The houses projected over the roadway, and were unprovided with rain-water gutters, and during a shower rain fell from the roofs into the middle of the street. These streets were filthy from constant contributions of slops and ordure from animals and human beings. There were no underground drains, and the soil of the town was soaked with the filth of centuries. This sodden condition of the soil must have affected the wells to a greater or less extent.” (“London, Sanitary and Medical,” by G. V. Poore. 1889.)

Moreover, the nineteenth century was well on its way before the last of the private cesspools disappeared from the dwelling-houses of London.

Edinburgh during the Middle Ages was, we are told, fresher and cleaner upon its wind-swept ridge than London, but with the erection of lofty houses in the High Street and Haymarket of the northern capital its atmosphere became much worse than that of London. The reason for this was that while the London houses remained low, and the population therefore, for a city, widely distributed, in those of Edinburgh, on the other hand, a large community of all classes of society was concentrated, from the noble lord and lady to the beggarly caddie and quean. And the whole stew was quite innocent of what we call drainage. Quite. Yet the waste-products of life, the lees and offscourings of humanity, all that housemaids call “slops,” had to be got rid of. Very simple problem this to our worthy Edinburgh forefathers. After dark the windows up in these “lands” were thrust open, and with a shrill cry of “Gardy-loo” (Gardez l’eau) the cascade of swipes and worse fell into the street below with a splash and an od—. “Ha! ha!” laughed Dr. Johnson to little Boswell; “I can smell you there in the dark!”

The hygienic reformation of Britain, although adumbrated by sundry laws made at intervals from the fifteenth century onwards, was not seriously taken in hand until as late as the sixties of last century, and Disraeli’s famous Act defining a bad smell as a “nuisance” became law in 1875.

But although we may justly congratulate ourselves upon the hygienic achievements of England, one result of which has been the minimising of unpleasant odours, nevertheless, as a wider consideration of the facts will show us, the task of cleansing the air of England is not yet entirely completed. It is doubtless true that what we may term domestic stenches have for the most part been dispelled, but as regards public fœtors there are still, I regret to say, a few that abide with us, seemingly as nasty as ever they were.

One deplorable instance you will encounter at the Paddington terminus of the Great Western Railway no less, at a certain platform of which station, lying in wait for our fresh country cousins on their arrival in London, there lurks a livid concoction of ancient milk, horse-manure, live stock, dead stock, and, in the month of July, fermenting strawberries, as aggressive and unashamed as the worst Lucerne has to offer. I commend it to the attention of the Medical Officer of Health for Paddington.

Nay more! This West London efflorescence does not lie blooming alone. It is by no means the last rose of summer. On the east side of the great city, another, a rival upas-tree, spreads its nauseating blight. This is a mess that, oozing from a soap factory near Stratford-atte-Bow, envelops in its oleaginous cloud several hundred yards of the main line of the Great Eastern Railway. And the world we live in is so arranged that the trains, particularly in summer, are held up by signal for several minutes in this neighbourhood, so that, as the greasy slabs of decomposing fats slump in at the open carriage windows, an early opportunity is afforded to our Continental visitors of becoming acquainted with the purifying properties of English soap.

I am blushing now for what I have been saying about Ireland, Cologne, Lucerne, France, and even the East.

This last instance, however, opens up a large subject, that, namely, of malodorous industries. Of these there is a great number, too great indeed for me to do more than make a passing allusion to them. The proximity of evil-smelling works and factories to human habitations is, as a matter of fact, prohibited by the Public Health Acts, but it is naturally impossible to remove them entirely from the knowledge of mankind inasmuch as the workers frequently carry the atmosphere about with them. Fortunately for them, but unfortunately for us, by reason of the rapid exhaustion of the olfactory sense (which we are about to deal with in the following section), they are, for the most part, not incommoded by the objectionable airs they work in.

Perhaps the worst of all are the bone-manure factories, malodorous mills which are almost invariably situated at a distance of several miles from any dwelling-house, as it would be impossible for any one but the workers themselves to live in their neighbourhood. These unfortunate people, many of whom are women, carry, as I have already remarked, the stench about with them on their clothing and persons, and I have observed that, being themselves insensitive to the odour, they cannot rid themselves of it even on Sundays and holidays.

In this class also we must place tanneries, glueworks, and size factories, a visit to which is a severe trial for any one unaccustomed to them. Dyeworks, likewise, by reason of the organic sulphur compounds they disseminate through the spongy air, are unpleasant neighbours. In cotton mills, also, the sizing-rooms are objectionable, and here, curiously enough, the operatives do not seem to become accustomed to the smell, as it is insinuatingly rather than bluntly offensive, and grows worse with use. So much so, indeed, that but few of the girls, I am told, are able to remain in that particular occupation for more than a few weeks at a time.

At this stage, albeit early in our disquisition, we may appropriately turn to consider the curious fact that of all our senses that of smell is perhaps the most easily exhausted. The olfactory organ, under the continued stimulation of one particular odour, quite quickly becomes insensitive to it. Perhaps this is the reason, or one of the reasons, why reform was so long delayed.

There are, however, in this respect great differences between odours. With some the smell is lost in a few seconds, while with others we continue to be aware of it for a much longer time. Curiously enough, odours seem, in this matter, to follow the general law of the feelings in that the pleasant are lost sooner than the unpleasant. It is the first breath of the rose that makes the fullest appeal, when the whole being becomes for a moment suffused with the loveliest of all perfumes. But only for a moment. All too soon the door of heaven closes and the richness thins away into the common airs of this our lower world.

On the other hand, the aversion we all feel from substances like iodoform, or, what is worse, scatol, owes not the least part of its strength to the fact that both of those vile smells are very persistent. As was once said to a surgeon applying iodoform to a wound in a patient’s nose: “This patient will certainly visit you again, sir, but—it will not be to consult you!”

To this more or less rapid exhaustion of the sense is due the merciful dispensation that no one is aware of his own particular aura. We are only cognisant of odours that are strange to us. The Chinese and Japanese find the neighbourhood of Europeans highly objectionable, and we return the compliment. It is the stranger to the Island who remarks the “very ancient and fish-like smell.”

Fatigue and then exhaustion of a sense-organ, rendering it finally irresponsive to a particular stimulus, is, of course, familiar to us also in the case of vision, as the soap advertisement of our boyhood with its complementary colours taught us. Taste manifests the same phenomenon, for which reason (so he says) the cheese-taster in Scotland swallows a little whisky after each of the different samples he tries. But, curiously enough, the healthy ear is not thus dulled save by a very loud, persistent noise, and then there is the risk of permanent damage to the hearing organ. Some forms of tactile sensation, also, would seem to remain ever sensitive, for, although it may be possible to become so inured to pain as to ignore it, yet that is probably a mental act, and it is said, moreover, that men have been tortured to death by the tickling of the soles of their feet.

But, as we have already seen, of all the senses none so quickly becomes inert under stimulation as olfaction. Why it would be hard to say, unless, like the exhaustion of colour-vision, it is due to the using up of some chemical reagent in the sense-organ. At all events, if you wish to appreciate the full intensity of a smell, you should arrange to come upon it from the open air.

I wonder if this, or something like it, is the reason why England was the first country in the world to wage war against its stenches. For the English are of all races the most addicted to fresh air. Consequently, they are the most likely to keep habitually their olfactory sense unspoiled and virgin. This, I admit, is only pushing the matter a step further back, and we are still left with the question: Why is it that the English are so fond of the open? Largely, I imagine, because their climate is so damp that an indoor atmosphere is always a little oppressive to them.

Whatever may be the reason, however, there is no doubt that the keen, clean chill of an English April day, especially when the wind is in the east (pace Mr. Jarndyce), brings to us an exaltation of spirit that surpasses the exhilaration of wine, and at the same time renders us impatient with mustiness and fustiness, intolerant of domestic stuffiness, and frankly disgusted with the pungent, prickly vapours of intimate humanity in the mass. The wind on the hilltop is our aspiration, our ideal. Hence, maybe, the Public Health Acts, and also the national tub.

The use of the domestic bath is, we must not forget, a social revolution of our own day and generation. Our grandfathers ventured upon a bath only when it seemed to be called for—by others. Our grandmothers, with their clean, white cotton or linen undergarments, had, or thought they had, even less need for it. Besides, in their prim and bashful eyes the necessary denudation antecedent to total immersion would have amounted, even when they were alone, to something like gross indecency. Before their time, again, in the eighteenth century, matters were even worse, for the society ladies of that day painted their faces instead of washing them, and mitigated the effects of seldom-changed underclothing by copiously drenching themselves with musk and other reliable perfumes. (I am told, however, that even to-day fashionable ladies refrain from washing their faces!)

The domestic bathroom is the direct offspring of the gravitation water-supply and the modern system of drainage. Buy an old house, and you will have to convert one of the bedrooms into your bathroom, and, to this day, you must carry your bath with you if you go to reside in certain of the Oxford colleges.

I can myself remember in my younger days in Scotland an old doctor having his first bath in the palatial surroundings of a modern bathroom. Not in his own house, needless to say! After a patient and particular inspection of all the glittering taps of “shower,” “spray,” “plunge,” and what not, he commended his spirit to the Higher Powers—or rather, I fear, according to his wont, for he was not of the Holy Willie persuasion, to the keeping of those of the Nether Regions. Then he proceeded gingerly to insert into the steaming water first of all his toes, then his feet, next his ankles, and so bit by bit, until, greatly daring, he had committed his entire body to the deep—to emerge as soon as possible! He was no coward, let me tell you, in the ordinary run of life. But this was his first bath in the altogether since his primal post-natal plunge. His first bath! And his last! It nearly killed him, he said; never in all his life had he felt so bad, and not for a thousand pounds would he repeat the experiment!

One more tale. Cockney this time. A gentleman of my acquaintance was one day discussing with an old-fashioned baker the modern making of bread by machinery. Both agreed that the older method made the better bread. The new was not so good. “It seems,” said my friend, “as if nowadays bread lacks something, but what that something is I cannot tell.”

“You are puffickly right, sir,” returned the baker. “It does lack something, and wot that something is I can tell you—it lacks the aromer of the ’uman ’and!”

CHAPTER II
THE SENSE OF OLFACTION IN LOWER ANIMALS

Olfaction is generally felt to be the lowest, the most animal, of the senses, so much so that in polite society it is scarcely good manners to mention smells, and I am well aware of the risks I run in writing a book on the subject. And yet this feeling is by no means false modesty, because it is, first and foremost, to the animal in us that smell makes its appeal. None of the other senses brings so frankly to notice our kinship with the brute.

Olfaction is, indeed, one of the primitive senses of animal life. And in man, as it happens, while vision has constructed for itself a highly complicated camera-like end-organ, and hearing has produced an apparatus even more elaborate, the olfactory organ, on the other hand, remains primitive, its essential structure having undergone no apparent evolutionary change from the simplest and earliest type.

This, perhaps, is scarcely the proper way of expressing the situation. Evolutionary change has, as a matter of fact, occurred, but it reaches its highest development not in man, but in terrestrial mammals otherwise inferior to him—in the dog, for example.

For once, man does not occupy the apex of the evolutionary pyramid.

Olfactory development, high or low, is linked up with the natural habits of the different species. Thus, mammals which go about on all fours, whose visual outlook is restricted and whose muzzle is near the ground, are the most highly gifted; those, again, like the seals, porpoises, whales, and walruses, which have reverted from a terrestrial to an aqueous environment, where smell is of less value to them, show poorly developed olfactory organs; and finally, the apes and man, living habitually above the ground, the former in trees, the latter on his hind legs, and relying chiefly upon vision, also show a decline from the high point reached by four-footed mammalians.

The animals of this kingdom are thus divided into macrosmatic and microsmatic groups. To the latter man belongs, but we must add that his olfactory sense has not yet degenerated so completely as that of certain other species (porpoises, etc.).

It is, of course, common knowledge that in most of the animals we are closely acquainted with the sense of smell is infinitely more delicate and acute than ours, so much so, indeed, that the imagination can on occasion scarcely conceive theirs to be of the same nature. As a matter of fact, many authorities incline to the belief that not only mammalians and other vertebrates, but also insects, must be guided to their food and to their love-mates by some kind of perception, by some mysterious sense, of which we are totally devoid.

As this is a division of our subject of the highest interest, and one to which we shall have occasion to recur at intervals throughout this treatise, we shall discuss the matter as fully as the space at our disposal will permit.

The unit of the olfactory sense-organ is the olfactory cell. This, which does not vary in structure from one end of the animal kingdom to the other, is microscopically seen to consist of an elongated body like a tiny rod, bearing on its free end a small enlargement or prominence, on the surface of which is a cluster of extremely fine protoplasmic filaments, the olfactory hairs. These hairs project into and are immersed in a thin layer of mucus, at all events in air-breathing animals, an environment which is necessary for their functional activity, because, if the nose becomes desiccated, as it does in some diseases, the sense of smell is lost (anosmia). The hairs are, without doubt, the true receptive elements of the olfactory cells. It is these which come into contact with and are stimulated by odours—whatever the nature of Odour may be.

The deep (proximal) end of the rod-like olfactory cell tapers into a nerve-fibre, which passes by way of the olfactory nerve to a special lobe of the brain—the olfactory lobe—in the vertebrates, or to a nerve-ganglion in the invertebrates.

Olfactory cells in man are only found in the upper—the olfactory—region of the nose, spread over a surface of about one square inch, the olfactory area—part lying on the outer (lateral) wall of each nasal passage and part on the septum, or partition between the nasal passages. In macrosmatic animals the olfactory area is relatively greater than in man, but there is apparently no other difference between them.

Olfactory cells are held in place by ordinary epithelial cells—the sustentacular cells—which contain pigment. Olfactory cells are found in animals as low in the scale as the sea-anemone. They occur in the integument of the animal, and their structure is the same as in man, the only difference evolution has brought about being that in the higher animals they are protected by lodgment in a cul-de-sac. Their function in the sea-anemone is probably limited to the sensing of food, but we do not yet know much about this particular organism.

It is otherwise with the olfaction of insects. Here the work of painstaking observers like Lubbock, Fabre, and Forel, has supplied us with a mass of information of the utmost interest, which we shall now proceed to discuss in some detail, commencing with the work of that remarkable French naturalist, Fabre, whose interest in the subject was aroused by an accident—the accident of which the genius of observation knows so well how to take advantage.

Having by chance a living female Great Peacock moth captive in his house, Fabre was surprised one night by the advent of some forty others of the same species—males in search of a mate. At once the question arose in his mind: How was it that they had been attracted?

Sight could not have guided them, because, apart from the comparative rarity of this moth in that particular district, the night of their arrival was dark and stormy, his house was screened by trees and shrubs, and the female was ensconced under a gauze cover. He observed, besides, that the males did not make straight for their objective, as is characteristic of movement when directed by sight. They blundered and went astray, some of them wandering into rooms other than that in which the female was lying. They behaved, that is to say, as we ourselves do when we are trying to locate the source of a sound or a smell. But sound was ruled out by the fact that they must have been summoned from distances of a mile or a mile and a half.

Olfaction remains, and with this in his mind Fabre undertook several experiments, some of which, as it happens, support, while others oppose, the theory of an olfactory cause.

When the female was sequestered under the gauze cover, and in drawers or in boxes with loosely-fitting lids, the males always succeeded in discovering her. But when she was placed under a glass cover, or in a sealed receptacle, no male at all appeared. Further, Fabre found that cotton-wool stuffed into the openings and cracks of her receptacle was also sufficient to prevent the summons reaching the males. This last observation should be borne in mind in view of further discussion later on regarding the nature of the lure.

Similar observations and experiments were made on the Lesser Peacock, with very much the same kind of result. But in dealing with this moth Fabre made an observation which, if it was accurate, tells against the theory of olfaction, or at least against such olfaction as we ourselves experience. At the time when he was carrying out his experiments the mistral was blowing hard from the north, and as nevertheless males arrived, they must all have come with the wind; no moth ever hatched could beat up against the mistral. But then, if the guide is an odour, the wind, blowing it to the south, would have prevented it ever reaching the males! Here, then, we have a circumstance which leaves us groping for an explanation.

In watching the behaviour of the third moth on his list, the Banded Monk, on the other hand, Fabre discerned a circumstance very strongly suggestive of the operation of an odorous lure. He found that, if the female was left for a time in contact with some absorbent material and was afterwards shifted, the males were attracted, not to her new situation, but to the place where she had originally been lying. Subsequent experiment showed that a period of about half an hour was necessary to lead to the impregnation of the neighbourhood with the effluvium she elaborated.

The obvious test was employed of trying to drown the supposed odour of the female by filling the room she was in with powerful aromas, like naphthaline, paraffin, the alkaline sulphides, and the like. But in spite of the presence of these stenches, in our experience overwhelming to fainter exhalations, the males still continued to arrive in droves. This result led Fabre to doubt whether it could really have been an odour that attracted them. But surely this negative conclusion ignores the possibility of the moths being anosmic to these gross scents while highly specialised for one particular olfactory stimulus to which, as a matter of fact, we ourselves are wholly insensitive.

Apart from this particular problem, however, to which we return below, biologists agree that insects undoubtedly possess an olfactory sense capable of appreciating the same kind of odours as ours does. Lubbock, for example, demonstrated that ants give signs of perceiving the presence of musk and other perfumes. There is no doubt, indeed, that the olfactory sense plays a great, it may be a preponderating part in their life-activity.

The olfactory organ of insects is situated at the bottom of little crypts in the antennæ and in the palpi of the mouth apparatus, more particularly in the antennæ. And those insects, like bees, wasps, butterflies and moths, that frequent flowers, are attracted to them by their perfumes as well as by their colours. It has been found, for example, that covering up flowers from view does not put a stop to the visits of insects. Some naturalists go so far, indeed, as to say that odour is their principal guide. At all events, the sarcophagic and stercophagic insects are attracted to their food chiefly, if not entirely, by odour. Fabre has recorded how such insects are lured to their death by certain insectivorous plants which exhale a smell like that of putrid beef.

In this connection I may interpolate here an experience which shows that this class of insect may be attracted solely by odour. Incidentally, it also manifests how the olfactory sense of insects can be utilised in the matter of hygiene.

A clever plumber of my acquaintance was once called to a large drapery establishment in the West End of London, because the dressmakers at work in one of the rooms were making complaints of an evil smell that haunted the place. So much had they been troubled, indeed, that several of them had been made ill by it. On examining the workroom my friend found everything apparently faultless. It was a large, well-lighted and airy apartment, and he himself was unable to detect anything amiss in the atmosphere. Plans were consulted, but no evidence could be found of any possible source of unpleasant odour. His opinion therefore was, that the ladies were—ladies, that is to say, fanciful, and the matter was dropped. But the ladies were not consenting parties to this opinion, and the complaints continued. More of the assistants fell ill as a consequence, they said, of the smell, so that he was again sent for. On this occasion, it being the height of summer, he called, on his way to the draper’s emporium, at a butcher’s shop, and much to that man’s surprise, asked permission to capture a few of his bluebottle flies. These he took with him to the draper’s, and, the suspected room having been emptied of furniture and occupants, he closed all the windows and doors and released his flies. After waiting patiently for some time, he observed that these amateur detectives of his had all made for one part of the room, where they were settling on the wall. Here he had an opening made, and found hidden behind the plaster an open drain-pipe, old and foul, which had formerly been connected with a lavatory, and had been enclosed and forgotten during some alterations made on the building several years before.

The olfactory sense of insects has been credited with perhaps even more wonderful powers than those we have just been writing about. For instance, both Lubbock and Forel have shown that the extraordinary aptitude ants possess for finding their way back to their nest after their peregrinations in the mazy labyrinth of their world depends upon the sense of smell. On their return to the nest they follow the scent left by their own footsteps.

This “homing” instinct, or “orientation,” which is found in many species of insects and animals, has long been a matter of interest to scientific naturalists. The subject is, however, much too large for us to enter fully into on the present occasion.

Winged insects like bees and wasps manifest also the homing instinct. In their case the return to the nest or hive is effected probably altogether under the guidance of vision. This is what we should expect, as elevation in the air secures for these creatures a wide and unimpeded view of their world. Circumstances are obviously different in the case of ants and other creeping things, whose immediate outlook, like that of four-footed mammals, is circumscribed to an area of but a few inches or feet at the most.

Investigating the orientation of ants, Forel found, first of all, that while the covering of their eyes with an opaque varnish “embarrassed” them to some extent, they went hopelessly astray when their antennæ were removed.

He also repeated Lubbock’s well-known experiments of supplying the ants with bridges over obstacles in the neighbourhood of their nests, noting their behaviour when the bridges were changed, removed, or reversed, with the result that he came to credit the olfactory system of ants with much greater powers than the more cautious Lubbock would have believed.

These insects, says Forel, exploring with their mobile antennæ the fields of odour they encounter, form in their memory a kind of “chemical topography.”

Thus when an ant sets out from her nest she distinguishes the various odours and varying strengths of odours she comes upon, noting and memorising them as in two main fields, one on her left side, the other on her right. In order to find her way back again all she has to do is to unwind, so to speak, the roll in her memory, transposing right and left, and this successfully accomplished will bring her back to the point she started from.

If, he concludes, we ourselves were endowed with such a perfect olfactory mechanism situated in long, flexible whip-lashes, which we could move and tap with each step, the world for us would be transformed. Odour would become a sense of forms. Thus the orientation of ants can be explained without assuming the existence of an unknown sense. (It has recently been suggested, by the way, that bats owe the exquisite power they manifest of steering their flight among obstacles to the use of their squeaks, the echoes from which enable them to form “sound-pictures” of their environment. In the same way a blind man in the street tapping the pavement with his stick forms a more or less well-defined sound-picture of the walls, doorways, and alleys about him.)

In the immediately foregoing paragraphs we have been dealing with the ability of insects to smell the smells that we smell. But Fabre’s experiments have familiarised us also with the notion that there are insects which can smell smells we cannot smell.

We shall see in the following section that the same may also be true of some of the higher animals.

In fish olfaction is, unlike that of air-breathing animals, effected by odorous material in solution. Whether or not their olfactory sense is as acute it is impossible in the present state of our knowledge to say. Anatomically the end-organ of fishes is simpler, but there are some species, the dog-fishes for example, which possess a large olfactory lobe in the brain; and this certainly suggests that they, at all events, are gifted with an olfactory sense of relatively high development.

Experiment on fish is difficult, nevertheless it has been definitely proved that they do smell, and it seems probable that the sense is used by them for food-perception. Moreover, that it may be highly sensitive seems likely from the fact that sharks (which belong to the same order as dog-fish) can be attracted from great distances to putrid meat thrown into the water as bait, the high dilution of which resembles the behaviour of odour in an air medium.

The belief that life in water, however, is less favourable than life on land to the fullest development of the sense is supported by the fact we have already mentioned that mammals living in water are extremely microsmatic.

In the macrosmatic terrestrial animals not only is the olfactory sense relatively highly organised, but it is absolutely the predominant sense. Vision is subsidiary to it. In their brains the olfactory region constitutes by far the largest component. (The same, by the way, is true of the Reptilia.)

In other words, it is upon the olfactory sense that these animals chiefly depend for their knowledge of the world. By it they are directed to their food, warned of their enemies, and attracted to their mates. Their universe is a universe of odour.

In order to become more intimate with the details of this part of our subject, we shall pass in review some of the olfactory habits and characteristics of the macrosmatic animal most familiar to us, namely, the dog.

There can be no doubt of the all-important part that smell plays in the life of the dog. Every one is familiar with it, and yet we do not often stop to think what its meaning is for the canine brain and understanding. One of the mysteries that must, one would suppose, for ever remain hidden from us, is what aspect the world we both share in company bears to this our closest animal friend. Who can tell what is passing through his mind as he sniffs at us? He can recognise his master by sight, no doubt, yet, as we know, he is never perfectly satisfied until he has taken stock also of the scent, the more precisely to do so bringing his snout into actual contact with the person he is examining. It is as if his eyes might deceive him, but never his nose.

The greyhound courses by sight, but all other dogs hunt by scent, and the speed and certainty of foxhounds in full cry bear a new significance when we recollect that it is scent that is directing them. Could vision be any more swift and sure?

We may heartily wish, as a child once remarked to a friend of mine, that Rover had a prettier way of saying “How d’ye do?” to his canine friends. But that and other even more objectionable habits do not prevent his entrée into the most exclusive circles of human society. He is taken at his own valuation, and that, to be sure, is considerable. But the minute, the meticulous, olfactory scrutiny he makes of other dogs is but one more example of the predominance of this sense in his brain. (See also later.)

When you take him for a walk also, how busy his nose makes him! Burrowing here and there among the grass and undergrowth, picking up an interesting trail that leads him a little way, until it crosses another, fresher, perhaps, or more interesting, that has to be taken up—here a cat’s, there a rat’s, further on a rabbit’s, and then, with short squeals, scrapings in the ground, and buryings of his muzzle, a weasel’s!—the whole intermixed and intermingled with whiffs of something like old decayed bones, or of another and an unfriendly dog, or of some ardent lady-love who has passed this way but shortly since!—is not this a richer, a fuller, a more attractive, world than ours, with its fickle sunlight, its pallid greys, its mournful purples, its unattainable horizon-blue? For our life is primarily one of vision.

I am sure his dreams, also, are compounded of the gorgeous odours of some other world, such odours as even our woods in autumn know nothing of.

But we must return again to science and Fabre. This time we shall accompany him on an excursion with the wonderful dog who is trained to discover for the gourmet the truffles that are growing deep in the soil.

Left to his own devices, we learn, the truffle-hunting dog indicates the position not only of truffles, but also of all manner of hypogean (underground) fungi, “the large and the small, the fresh and the putrid, the scented and the unscented, the fragrant and the stinking.” Only, he never at any time indicates the presence of the ordinary mushroom, not even while it is still underground, before it sprouts up as the fungus we know. And yet to our nostrils the mushroom has the same smell as many of the hypogean fungi he does indicate. Consequently, therefore, the dog is not guided to the deep fungi by what may be called the general odour common to all fungi. He must be able, that is to say, to distinguish the hypogean varieties by some quality which is not odour, or, at least, not odour as we understand it.

There is, as it happens, something like a truffle-hunter among the insects also, what is known as the Bolboceros beetle. This little creature feeds on the hydnocystis arenaria, a hypogean fungus. Fabre, having captured some of these insects, placed them on earth in which he had buried the fungus at depths of six or seven inches. It was found that the beetles, without making any trial bores, sank vertical shafts through the soil direct to their food.

We may insert here also, as bearing upon the problem which is now emerging into clearness, an observation and a suggestion similar, as we shall see, to that of Fabre, on the badger by Mr. Douglas Gordon (Spectator, August 6th, 1921):

“The real damage wrought by the badger is microscopic. His diet mainly consists of roots, green herbs, mice, frogs, and insects. Like the fox, he has a great partiality for whorts and blackberries when in season, and he is particularly fond of grubs. For the sake of these he will dig out every wasp’s nest he can find. A considerable number of rabbit ‘stops’ also fall to his share, and in unearthing the latter he practises a somewhat remarkable piece of woodcraft. The hole which contains the nest may run to the depth of several feet, and the nest itself be situated ten feet from any entrance, but this does not trouble the badger. He makes no attempt to follow the tortuous passage, as a man when digging would be obliged to do. His unerring nose locates the exact spot where the young rabbits lie, and from the most convenient point he bores for them. Should it be a ‘ground-burrow,’ he sinks a vertical shaft. In the case of a steep bank he drives a horizontal tunnel, and, shallow or deep, with unvarying accuracy.

“Not long ago I saw a striking case of this on Haldon Hill, near Exeter. The burrow opened on to a little gully, and ran back some distance under the heath. At least five paces from the nearest hole was the badger’s freshly cut shaft, about three feet deep, and around it were littered the ruins of the nest—the little tale of bloodstained fur so eloquent of tragedy. There on the earth drawn from the shaft the raider’s spoor was plain enough, but no imprint of his pads could I find upon the impressionable mould anywhere near the holes. This meant that he must have found the nest while traversing the heather—sensed it beneath him, in fact. And here an interesting point arises. What sense did he employ? Could he possibly ‘smell’ the rabbits through three feet of packed mould? Earth is a potent deodoriser. Do certain animals possess a sixth sense—a sympathy something akin to that of the divining rod? If so, this goes farther to explain the much-discussed principle of scent than anything yet suggested.”

Is this sense, then, as we see it in operation in the badger, in the truffle-hunting dog, in the Bolboceros beetle, and still more wonderfully in the Peacock and Banded Monk moths, drawn to their mates “from the edge of the horizon,” and, it may be, against the wind—is this sense the same as our own sense of olfaction, only much more acute? Fabre finds some difficulty in believing that it can really be the same. “Odour,” he argues, “is molecular diffusion.” But nothing material, nothing our senses can perceive, is emitted by these moths, and yet they can summon their mates from relatively enormous distances. However fine may be the divisibility of matter, Fabre’s mind refuses to entertain the suggestion that this far-flung summons is addressed to a sense of smell of the same nature as ours. It would be tantamount, he says, “to reddening a lake with an atom of carmine, to filling immensity with nothing.”

It is impossible not to sympathise with this opinion, but caution compels us to say that for the most striking of these observations, that of the calling of the males against a high wind, we should like to have confirmation by some independent observer.

Besides, I think perhaps Fabre would have hesitated to express his scepticism regarding the power of insect olfaction had he known more of the marvels of the human sense.

Vanillin, for example, is perceptible by us as a smell when it amounts to no more than 0·000000005 gram in a litre of air; and we can perceive mercaptan, a substance with a garlicky odour, in a dilution of 1/460,000,000 of a milligram in fifty cubic centimetres of air (approximately 0·0000000026 of a grain in a little over three cubic inches of air!) (See also p. [108].)

What is this but immensity filled with nothing? And yet we, even we, microsmatic though we are, can perceive that “nothing.”

But we must pick up again the thread of Fabre’s argument. Baffled as he feels himself to be when he regards olfaction in the light of these observations of his, he goes on: “For emission substitute undulation, and the problem of the Great Peacock is explained. Without losing any of its substance a luminous point shakes the ether with its vibrations and fills a circle[^[1]] of indefinite width with light....

[1]. A sphere rather.

“It does not emit molecules; it vibrates; it sets in motion waves capable of spreading to distances incompatible with a real diffusion of matter.

“In its entirety smell would thus seem to have two domains: that of particles dissolved in the air and that of ethereal waves. The first alone is known to us....

“The second, which is far superior in its range through space, escapes us altogether, because we lack the necessary sensory equipment. The Great Peacock and the Banded Monk know it at the time of the nuptial rejoicings. And many others must share it in various degrees according to the exigencies of their mode of life.”

In criticism of this conclusion of Fabre, however, we must again draw attention to the fact that in the case of the Greater Peacock he found that a plug of cotton-wool was sufficient to prevent the emanation leaving the immediate neighbourhood of the female, a circumstance strongly in favour of some material exhalation which was caught and held by the cotton-wool filter. Again, in the case of the Banded Monk, the suggestion of odour is unmistakable in the tainting, as it were, of substances in her vicinity with her emanation. Further, if the guide to the males were something like a luminous undulation we should expect that, like the Bolboceros beetle and the badger, there would have been no blundering and going astray; they would have precipitated themselves straight on to the female, or as near to her as they could get.

Moreover, although we are ourselves unable to detect any odorous emanation, may not our inability be due simply to the fact that our olfactory hairs are not susceptible to this particular stimulus? It may be of the same nature as odour, and yet we may be unable to perceive it, just as the moths themselves seemed anosmic to what we would call the stenches Fabre filled his room with.

These critical questions seem to me to be difficult to answer. Nevertheless, our imagination is certainly staggered by the fact of a tiny creature like a moth being able to disseminate in the immensity of atmospheric space an odour capable of perception at such great distances as a mile or a mile and a half. Hero, with the Great Peacock’s power, could have summoned Leander from a hundred miles away.

Apart, however, from such considerations for and against his opinions, one of the modern theories of odour, and of odour belonging to Fabre’s first, or material, order, is, as we shall see later on, that even it is a vibratory and not a material quality.

But leaving that development aside, and admitting for the moment the validity of Fabre’s contentions, I am bold enough to ask: Are we human beings so ignorant of the second domain of olfaction as he supposes? Is it true that we are, as he says, lacking in the equipment necessary for the exploration of that mysterious region? To answering these questions we shall presently address ourselves. In the meantime, I may forestall what I shall then say by remarking that I count it a very remarkable circumstance, if not, indeed, a significant coincidence, that, before I had become acquainted with Fabre’s writings, I had, considering the phenomena of human olfaction and psychology alone, actually asked myself the same question as he asks, and had come to very much the same conclusion.

CHAPTER III
OLFACTORY MEMORY

The predominant special senses in man are vision and hearing, olfaction occupying a quite unimportant position in the scale.

Smell and taste, by the way, are usually regarded not only as allied senses, but also as if they were akin in their nature and function. Allied they are, undoubtedly, seeing that both subserve the function of food-perception. But the resemblance ends there. For, of the two, smell is at once the more delicate and the more extensive in capacity, and, as they differ widely in their anatomical structure, there can be no doubt but that in physiological action also they are dissimilar.

The taste-bulbs are capable of appreciating four sensations only, and these quite simple, while the capacity of the olfactory organ, as we shall see more fully later on, is practically unlimited. All the subtlety of “taste,” all that we call “flavour,” is an olfactory sensation. Thus, people devoid of the sense of smell cannot discern the finer savours. They would be unable to distinguish, say, a vanilla from a strawberry ice. All they could tell would be that both were cold and sweet.

The popular phrase which refers the appreciation of the finer shades of taste to the “palate” we may therefore look upon as an attempt to express the feeling that delicate flavours are sensed somewhere higher up than in the mouth. So that a “man of taste” is really a man of smell, and all the literary eloquence in praise of wine and dainty food, to say nothing of the more prosy cookery books, is, in reality, a general hymn of adulation offered unwittingly to the nose!

Compared with sight and hearing, however, smell in man is only one of the minor senses. But, as if to make up for a position so inferior, it is remarkable as being the most subtle of all our senses, possibly, as some hold, because of the ancestral appeal to our (more or less repressed) animal nature. So subtle is it, indeed, that I am persuaded its stimuli may not, on occasion, emerge into consciousness at all. They remain below the threshold. So that, although subjected to their influence, we may remain ignorant of the cause of that influence. For smell often operates powerfully, not only in surreptitiously enriching and invigorating the mental impression of an event, but also in directing at times the flow of ideas into some particular channel independent of the will. The influence of the perfume of a woman’s hair in unexpectedly arousing a feeling of intimacy will appeal to the male reader as a good example of this upsurging interference with the placid flow of normal ideation.

Perhaps, also, this is the explanation of a strange and rather unpleasant ghost-story I once heard. I dare not vouch for the truth of it, but as it bears upon the subject we are considering, I give it here, not without misgiving, for what it is worth. For the sake of verisimilitude I shall relate it pretty much in the narrator’s own words:

“The evening he came back I was sitting in my room alone. I had just got back from the play, the subject of which had been, it so happened, the influence of people recently dead upon those left behind. I suppose that’s what turned my mind to my sorrow of the previous year when I lost him. It is my husband I am talking about.

“I was sitting gazing at the fire, and I expect you will say I had fallen asleep. Perhaps I had. It doesn’t matter really.

“We had been happy enough together, he and I. Just an ordinary married couple, you might say. But now and then a terrible longing would come over me just to see him once more, ... to hear him speak, ... to touch him.... I know it is selfish, and maybe unwise, to give way to those feelings, ... but never mind that! Well, on the night I am telling you about, there came to my recollection some of the silly cantrips those Spiritualist people used to carry on. Oh, yes, it is quite true: I had gone once or twice to see them, and had even taken part in their services—séances, I should say—in James’s lifetime, I mean, before he died. Indeed I went with him.... I never went after.... I don’t know.... It seemed to me like trifling somehow. Anyhow I have never gone since.

“All the same there came into my head a curious jingling rhyme I had heard them repeat once or twice, because they said somebody called Plato or Plautus or something had used it. It would bring back the dead, so they used to say, if you recited it alone at midnight, and accompanied it with certain gestures. The words are nothing but gibberish, a jumbled sort of.... No, I’m not going to repeat them.... Let me go on.

“Before I had realised what I was doing, without stopping to think, I uttered the words aloud, moving my arms so as to follow the ritual. Scarcely were the syllables out of my mouth—it closes with the name and the clock was striking twelve as I spoke it—scarcely, I say, were the words out of my mouth when—God! the pang comes yet when I think of it!—I heard the latch-key going into the hall door, and the door slowly opening—I was alone in the flat, and—oh! I can never tell you! I felt dreadful!—I didn’t know how to undo the thing, and yet I knew it was wrong—wicked—I never for a moment thought.—Perhaps it had been my longing so much.—The hall door opened.—The chain wasn’t up.—I heard a step,—a cough—oh! the usual sounds he used to make when he came in.—What would he be like?—What...? what...?

“Then the door of the room opened, and there he stood, swinging himself backwards and forwards, half toes, half heels, in a way he had, and replacing his jingling keys in his trouser-pocket—I could only stare at him speechless, and gasp—till suddenly he stretched out his hand and pointed at me with a ... a sort of snarl.

“‘Good heavens, Jane!’—the words sounded so commonplace that every trace of the unearthly was dissipated at the first syllable.—‘Good heavens, Jane! Go and change that frock!—How often have I told you what a fright you look in mauve.—A mill-girl on a holiday!—Come! Get along and change it!’

“It seems silly, I daresay, and all that, but, do you know, no sooner did I hear him growling and grumbling and finding fault with colours he had a dozen times at least admired and praised than—I couldn’t help it!—I forgot everything—everything. And all I could say was:

“‘James! You’ve been eating onions again!’

“‘Not my fault, I assure you, my dear,’ he snapped back; ‘that damned cook always will put garlic in the nectar! You must get rid of her.’

“... I suppose I must have fainted then, for I remember no more till I found myself lying on the floor with my head on the fender. I picked myself up very puzzled as to what had happened. Then I remembered my ... dream, with a shock rather of amusement than fear, when suddenly—suddenly I smelled the nauseating stench of strong garlic! That finished me entirely. How I got out of the place I cannot tell. Out I did get. And I have never gone back.”

This lady evidently would not have subscribed to the old teaching of Salerno:

“Six things that heere in order shall issue

Against all poisons have a secret poure.

Peares, Garlick, reddish-roots, Nuts, Rape and Rew,

But Garlick cheese, for they that it devoure

May walk in ways infected every houre;

Sith Garlick then hath poure to save from death

Bear with it though it make unsavoury breath:

And scorne not Garlick, like to some that think

It only makes men wink, and drinke, and stink.”

(It may be remembered, by the way, that Wilkie Collins’s “Haunted Hotel” was haunted by a smell.)

Although we may agree with Shelley that

“Odours when sweet violets sicken

Live within the sense they quicken,”

yet we must admit that the memory of an odour cannot be reproduced in our mind with the same clearness as a vanished scene or an old tune.

It may be found on trial that by concentrating the attention strongly upon some familiar smell, particularly if at the same time we stimulate the memory by picturing in our mind’s eye a scene in which that odour figured as a feature in the sensory landscape, we are sometimes able to recall its actual sensation. But the recollection lacks the intimate reality of visual and auditory images. Without doubt the mind’s eye and mind’s ear, when consciously aroused, are consistently more acute and their representations are more vivid than those of the mind’s olfactory organ.

When, for instance, I call to memory the drawing-room of my boyhood days, I can once more catch a faint reminiscence of the acid-sweet rose-leaves that filled it with perennial fragrance, but not until I have first of all recalled its pale greys and blues and its over-bright windows, not until I have listened once more to “The March of the Troubadours” my mother is playing on the old rosewood piano, like a call to some life greater, grander, and, above all, more simple than this bewildering affair!

People, Ribot has ascertained, vary considerably in their power of resuscitating dead perfumes. According to his statistics, 40 per cent. could not revive any image at all; 48 per cent. could recall some, but not all; and only 12 per cent. could recall all or nearly all at pleasure. The odours most easy to bring back were pinks, musk, violet, heliotrope, carbolic acid, the smell of the country, grass, and so on. Many, as in my own case, have to evoke the visual image first.

But if the recollection of a scene can only with difficulty, or not at all, revive the sensation of an odour, the converse is most startlingly true. For odours have an extraordinary, an inexplicable, power of spontaneously and suddenly presenting a forgotten scene to the mind, and with such nearness to reality that we are translated bodily, being caught up by the spirit, as it were, like St. Philip, to be placed once more in the midst of the old past life, where we live the moment over again with the full chord of its emotions vibrating our soul and startling our consciousness. There are, it is true, certain sounds which wield the same miraculous power over our being—

“... the chime familiar of a bell

Last heard at sea, but now on homely ground,

Can, with the sprites that deep in memory dwell,

Create the world anew with stroke of sound,

Transforming daisied fields to foaming seas,

And changing vales from summer calm serene

To warring tides round wintry Hebrides

That fling and toss in wat’ry hillocks green”—

but I do not think they operate in this way so frequently as do smells.

This strange revival of bygone days by olfaction is, as I have said, automatic. It is most clearly and completely to be realised when the inciting odour comes upon us unawares, and then as in a dream the whole of the long-forgotten incident is displayed, even although it may have been an incident in which the odour itself was not specially obtrusive. Yet the display is not only a spectacle, for we become, as I have already laboured to point out, once more actors in the old life-drama.

Now memory can nearly always be recognised as memory. There is about its representations a dulling in colour, a haziness in outline, a vagueness in detail, that serves to distinguish it from the harder, clearer pictures of the imagination. Its figures and their doings are like ghosts; through them you can see the solid furniture of to-day. But from the olfactory miracle we are now considering the effect of time, the fraying effect of time and superimposed incident, is absent. That is still fresh, still, as we might say, in process of elaboration, the manifold and complicated experiences we have undergone since its occurrence being blotted for the moment out of the mind.

Curiously enough, although Ribot finds that about 60 per cent. of people experience the “spontaneous” revival of odour in memory, and so presumably are subject to this arresting phenomenon, it does not seem to have been mentioned by writers in general until about our own time. At all events, the earliest allusion I can find to it is in “Les Fleurs du Mal” of Baudelaire:

“Lecteur, as-tu quelquefois respiré

Avec ivresse et lente gourmandise

Ce grain d’encens qui remplit une église

Ou d’un sachet le musc invétéré?

“Charme profond, magique, dont nous grise

Dans le présent le passé restauré”....

Shortly after Baudelaire’s time Bret Harte, on the other side of the Atlantic, imported it into “The Newport Romance”:

“But the smell of that subtle, sad perfume,

As the spiced embalmings, they say, outlast

The mummy laid in his rocky tomb,

Awakes my buried past.

“And I think of the passion that shook my youth,

Of its aimless loves and its idle pains,

And am thankful now of the certain truth

That only the sweet remains.”

But the most precise and definite allusion to this curious power of odours seems to have first been made by Oliver Wendell Holmes in “The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table.” Here is what he says, and it will be noted that he makes as high a claim for the power of olfaction as I have done:

“Memory, imagination, old sentiments and associations, are more readily reached through the sense of SMELL than by almost any other channel.”

“Phosphorus fires this train of associations in an instant; its luminous vapours with their penetrating odour throw me into a trance; it comes to me in a double sense, ‘trailing clouds of glory.’”

“Perhaps the herb everlasting, the fragrant immortelle of our autumn fields, has the most suggestive odour to me of all those that set me dreaming. I can hardly describe the strange thoughts and emotions that come to me as I inhale the aroma of the pale, dry, rustling flowers. A something it has of sepulchral spicery, as if it had been brought from the core of some great pyramid, where it had lain on the breast of a mummied Pharaoh. Something, too, of immortality in the sad, faint sweetness lingering so long in its lifeless petals. Yet this does not tell why it fills my eyes with tears and carries me in blissful thought to the banks of asphodel that border the River of Life.”

In introducing the subject, Holmes states that he has “occasionally met with something like it in books, somewhere in Bulwer’s novels, ... and in one of the works of Mr. Olmstead.”

When one considers the obvious poetic appeal of this psychic phenomenon as exemplified in the touching expressions we have just quoted, it seems strange that the older writers made no use of it.

Even omniscient Shakespeare, although odorous images and allusions are not uncommon in his works, seems to have overlooked this sportive trick of the sense. Otherwise we might have had Lady Macbeth sleep-walking because her nightposset exhaled the vapour of the draught she had drugged Duncan’s guards with.

Several seventeenth century writers make a general reference to odours as “strengthening the memory.” Here is one for which I am indebted to my friend F. W. Watkyn-Thomas:

“Olfactus (loq.)—

Hence do I likewise minister perfume

Unto the neighbour brain, perfume of force,

To cleanse your head, and make your fancy bright

To refine wit and sharp invention,

And strengthen memory: from whence it came

That old devotion incense did ordain

To make man’s spirit more apt for things divine....”

(“Lingua, or the Combat of the Tongue and the Five Senses,” Act IV., Sc. 5, Anthony Brewer (circa 1600): Dodsley’s “Old Plays,” Vol. V., p. 179, 1825.)

And Montaigne may be alluding to it when he says:

“Physicians might (in my opinion) draw more use and good from odours than they do. For myself have often perceived, that according unto their strength and qualitie, they change and alter, and move my spirit, and worke strange effects in me: Which makes me approve the common saying, that invention of incense and perfumes in Churches, so ancient and so far-dispersed throughout all nations and religions, had an especiall regard to rejoyce, to comfort, to quicken and to rowze and to purifie our senses, ...”

The Jacobean herbalists and therapeutists in general, as we shall see later on, frequently credit aromatics with the power of strengthening the memory. But, so far as my reading goes, I have failed to find a clear and unmistakable description of this peculiar phenomenon in any writer prior to the nineteenth century. It is, of course, difficult to prove a negative, and so it would not be surprising if some such allusion were to be dug up. But even then the wonder would remain that it had attracted little, if any, attention from others. As a matter of fact, mental happenings of this order did not interest our forebears much. Shakespeare is the exception to this statement, and that is one of his claims to greatness.

Moreover, quite apart from this particular, the writings of the old English poets and of such French and German authors as I am acquainted with, seem curiously deficient in references to all but the more gross and obvious phenomena of olfaction, and these are most frequently of the farcical order, a little too gross and obvious for modern readers.

Since Dickens’s time, however, we have had almost too much literary odour.

I do not agree with the purists who deny to Dickens the glory of a great writer of English prose. Dickens was an impressionist, perhaps the first and certainly the greatest of this school, and as such he was a master. Few equal and none surpass him in the rare vigour of scene, and portrait-painting. And it is significant to find him using the aroma of the place and also of the person to impart life and reality to his description.

Take for example, to cite but one out of many olfactory references in his books, the humorous analysis of the smells in various London churches in “The Uncommercial Traveller.” One congregation furnishes “an agreeable odour of pomatum,” while in the others “rat and mildew and dead citizens” seemed to be the fundamentals, to which in some localities was added “in a dreamy way not at all displeasing” the staple character of the neighbourhood. “A dry whiff of wheat” circulated about Mark Lane, and he “accidentally struck an airy sample of barley out of an aged hassock” in another. The reader’s throat begins at once to feel dry.

Then note how Mr. E. W. B. Childers starts from the page the moment his creator breathes into our nostrils a breath of his life:—“a smell of lamp oil, straw, orange-peel, horses’ provender, and sawdust.”

I could fill this book with olfactory citations from Dickens alone. But to come to contemporary writers, those of Rudyard Kipling are almost as plentiful, the smell that brings places to the mind being a favourite with him. But I have always wondered how it came about that the highly sensitive nose of Mr. Kipling permitted Imray’s corpse on the rafters above the ceiling-cloth to remain undiscovered for as long as three months. This in India. The bungalow, we gather, was haunted. It would be.

Nevertheless, in spite of the keen olfaction of both of those writers, neither of them, as far as I can remember, weaves the memory-reviving power of olfaction into a plot. We come across it, however, in foreign literature, as in the suggestive play made with the smell of lamp-oil in Dostoievsky’s “Crime and Punishment.”

The more recent English and foreign writers, however, give us a surfeit of odours—as if to prove their superiority in this as in all else.

It seems strange, moreover, that the theatre should have overlooked this avenue to the memory and imagination of its audiences. The ancient Romans, to be sure, during the gladiatorial games, used to perfume the atmosphere of the Colosseum, whether to counteract the raw smell of dust, blood, and sweat, it were hard to say, as these rank odours play their part, again subtly, in stimulating the slaughterous passions of mankind.

But our modern theatre, which a prominent Scots ecclesiastic of the nineteenth century characterised as redolent only of “orange-peel, sawdust, and vice,” has not yet risen to anything higher than a continuous discharge of incense during spectacular dramas depicting the (theatrical) East.

Why not go further? Think how the appeal of a love-scene would be strengthened by an invisible cloud of roses blown into the house through the ventilating shafts! The villain would be heralded by an olfactory motif of a brimstony flavour mingled, if he was of the usual swarthy countenance, with a soupçon of garlic. The hero, well groomed and clean-limbed, would waft a delicate suggestion of Brown Windsor to the love-sick maidens in the dress-circle. The heavy father would radiate snuff with his red pocket-handkerchief. The large-eyed foreign adventuress would permeate the auditorium on wings of patchouli. The dear broken-hearted old mother would disseminate that most respectable of perfumes (for there is a caste-system among smells) eau de Cologne—a scent that always evokes in my mind a darkened room, tiptoes, hushed voices, raised forefingers, and Somebody in bed with a—headache.

And so on. Here is a new way of “putting it over.”

Critics will object that, as the influence of eau de Cologne on my own mind shows, the particular odours so supplied would defeat their purpose by calling up a thousand different and incongruous images in the thousand minds of the audience. But such mischances could easily be avoided by conventionalising the odours after the manner already familiar in the stock gesticulations of our players, all of whom enter, sit down, pull off their gloves, blow their noses, utter defiance, shed tears, launch curses, make love, live, die, and are buried, according to an inveterate, cast-iron ritual.

CHAPTER IV
SMELL AND SPEECH

That the effect of odour upon the mind is largely concealed is further illustrated by the curious fact that our native language does not possess a terminology descriptive of smells. We never name an odour; we only say it has a “smell like” something or another. As a matter of fact, the same remark was made regarding French by P. P. Poncelet as long ago as 1755.

In this defect smell is unique among the senses. Even the sense that governs equilibration, of which the consciousness in normal conditions is never aware, has furnished us with “giddy” and “dizzy.”

Vision is represented by hundreds of words. We have, for instance, names not only for the primary colours red, yellow, and blue, but also for many of their combinations. (In these remarks we are not including the modern names given to the many shades of the synthetic colours.)

If we take red as an example, we find scarlet, crimson, vermilion, and pink. This colour, indeed, is ranked above all others in the vulgar tongue as having shades, doubtless because red, being the colour of blood and so of danger, always makes a strong appeal to the mind, an appeal which, among the responses, has led to special names being given to four of its tones.

The sense of hearing again, upon which speech is wholly dependent, has given rise to a multitude of words, many of them closely imitative of the sound, or onomatopoetic, with which words English, like the related German, is richly adorned.

Touch also has produced a number of descriptive epithets—“hot,” “cold,” “wet,” “dry,” “moist,” “clammy,” “rough,” “smooth,” as well as those like “heavy” and “light,” from the deep tactile sensibility.

Even taste has its vocabulary, a complete one, as it happens, since each of the four varieties of taste has its own appropriate name—“sweet,” “sour,” “bitter,” and “salt.”

But smell is speechless. We can truthfully say that in our native English language there is not a single word characterising any one of all the myriad odours in the world.

No doubt there are many words that we do apply to smells. But they are either borrowed from the vocabulary of one of the other senses, in order to describe a state of mind induced by the smell, or else they originate from some known odoriferous object.

Thus in the opening paragraph of this book we encountered a large number of olfactory words. But they are all vague; some applying to pleasant, some to unpleasant, odours. Many of them are very expressive, for disgust begets strong language. But although our olfactory vocabulary may be forceful, it is not discriminative. In other words, it is an emotional, not an intellectual, vocabulary.

These considerations will become more obvious as we deal with olfactory epithets in detail.

Thus smells may be “faint” or “strong,” but so may any other sensation. And to call a smell “sweet” leaves it but vague, while at the same time the epithet is borrowed from the vocabulary of taste, where its meaning is quite precise. “Pungent” is also a transposition, this time from touch, as it is a Latin word signifying “prickly.”

In addition to such terms as these we have a small number of words which we are in the habit of applying to certain classes of odours. “Musty” is one of these. This adjective certainly has the look of a pure English word about it, but, as it indicates a smell like that of mould, it is probably derived from the Latin mucidus, mouldy; we cannot, therefore, claim it to be English any more than we can claim it to be definite. Perhaps the puff-balls of our autumn woods supply the best example of a musty smell.

“Mawkish,” however, is certainly English, as it is derived from an old word, still used, by the way, in Scotland—“mauk,” a maggot. “Dank,” again, means moist, and is the smell of damp, cold places. “Stuffy” also, which is a modern application to a smell, is the odour of a close, badly ventilated room, where we feel oppressed, as if half stifled.

But these words—and there are not many more of them—are only applied vaguely and to general classes of odours. We never say of any one in particular that, e.g., “This is the smell called ‘dank,’” in the precise way we can say: “That colour is green,” or “That sound is a whistle.”

We may even go further. We know that the flavour of things tasted is an olfactory sensation. Now while language attains to precision in characterising the sensations of pure taste, as we have just seen, it is significant that flavours are left unnamed, except in the manner we have just explained for olfactory epithets.

The scanty number of odorous terms in English has of late been copiously added to by words borrowed from other languages, chiefly, it is said, from the Persian.

“Musk,” for instance, is Persian. “Aroma” is pure Greek, and if Liddell and Scott’s suggested derivation of ἄρωμα (a spice) from the Sanscrit ghrâ (a smell) is correct, then the original meaning of “aromatic” is merely “smelly.” “Mephitic,” not a popular word even now, comes from the Latin mephitis, “a foul, pestilential exhalation from the ground, often sulphury in character, as from volcanic regions.” The brimstone odour of the devil—of which more anon—is mephitic.

Now we must here discriminate. Etymologists, delving down among the roots of our spoken language, come, so they say, to a point at which even the simplest epithet, even the plainest description of a sensation, is seen to derive from some object. Obviously this must be so in the beginning, whether or not etymologists are always correct in their particular ascriptions. An adjective describing, and later denoting, a quality, is generalised from some object bearing that quality. A “stony” countenance is a countenance rigid as stone. So in like manner, we are told, even the names of colours, deeply embedded in the language though they be, are ultimately referable to objects bearing that colour. “Brown,” to take the least dubitable instance, is the colour of burnt—“brunt”—things, while “blue,” according to authority, like the Scots “blae,” means “livid” really, and is connected with “blow,” being the colour left after a blow. (But we say “a black eye”!)

Thus the descriptive epithets not only of smell, but also of sight, are ultimately derived from objects. But there is this great difference between them: the names of colours take us back to near the original trunk from which the Aryan languages branch off, whereas the names of odours, to this day still vague and indeterminate (at least in popular phraseology), are derived from the spoken tongue of to-day, or, in some cases, from foreign languages, and are, therefore, but recent additions.

This delay in the naming of classes of odours justifies the statement made at the outset of this section that smell is speechless. It shows, in other words, that although, as we have seen, its influence upon the mind may be profound, yet that influence does not extend as far as the speech-centres. It remains largely in the subconsciousness.

We should be guilty of error, however, were we to conclude that the scantiness of olfactory names is due to the lack of recognition by the consciousness of early man of smell in general, or to a failure to distinguish between different odours, because savages, in general less discriminating and analytical than cultured races, have, there is every reason to believe, a more acute and highly perfected olfactory sense. It has been reported that the North American Indian was able to track his enemy or his game by the scent alone, and Humboldt has recorded a similar acuteness on the part of the Indians of Peru. While admitting the marvellous skill of the American Indians in following up their quarry, most of us will, I imagine, be inclined to doubt whether its dependence upon smell is a true inference from the facts observed. Skill in woodcraft can be brought to such marvellous perfection that it may seem like magic to the onlooker—like magic, or like scent!

Further, although we are able to distinguish clearly enough between different odours, the identification and the naming of odours does not come easy to us. Parfumeurs and druggists, no doubt, by the daily education of the sense, attain to a high degree of skill in this art, but those who have not cultivated their powers will find it very difficult, as the amusing parlour-game of guessing the names of concealed foodstuffs and spices shows. The difficulty is, like the paucity of olfactory terms, probably due to an absence of ready communication between the olfactory and speech centres in the brain.

CHAPTER V
SMELL IN FOLK-LORE, RELIGION, AND HISTORY

Evidence of olfactory influences is encountered in folk-lore not infrequently, particularly in connection with primitive medicine, and survivals of old olfactory methods of treatment are still extant, not only in the doings of the wise women of our remoter country villages, but also, as we shall see, in modern scientific medicine.

Treatment by fumigation is perhaps the most widely prevalent of these.

Probably the earliest motive for “smoking” a patient was merely the replacing of an offensive by a pleasant odour, as we find it frequently employed in malodorous conditions. Here the practice links up with ancient ideas on epidemic diseases.

Behind this rationale, however, there lies perhaps the idea of association of death with the fœtor of decomposition and the expectation that a pleasant aromatic odour will naturally “obviate the tendency to death.” This view of the matter must have become strengthened among nations like the ancient Egyptians, who had discovered that aromatic substances might be relied upon to preserve the body after death. Even in recent times and countries similar customs have prevailed. Scott in “The Bride of Lammermoor” tells us that rosemary, southernwood, rue and other plants were in Scotland strewn on the body after death, and were “burned by way of fumigation in the chimney.”

Be that as it may, we find fumigation employed all over the world as a rite of purification, particularly during the menstrual and puerperal periods, women being at those times regarded as unclean or taboo.

Later, in the natural course of evolution, fumigation comes under the category of anti-demoniac remedies.

When disease was ascribed to the operation of demons in residence in the patient’s body, a belief at one time world-wide in its distribution, the treatment mostly relied upon to cure the disease, and, granting the premises, a perfectly rational therapeutic method, was by various devices to render the patient’s body too uncomfortable for the demon. And among many other modes of securing this desirable end was the smoking of the demon out by strong odours, fumes being generated around the patient by burning horns, hair, and certain odoriferous woods and plants. Among the Chippeway Indians, we are told, a species of cypress was set on fire for this purpose, and the efficacy of the remedy was heightened by the needle-shaped leaves of the tree flying off and sticking in the spirit.

Sometimes a medical man may feel disposed to smile when he sees the priest in church “censing” the Bible in order to drive away the evil one before he begins to read it. Yet fumigation has lingered on long in medicine as well as in religion. During the severe epidemics of cholera in Egypt not so many years ago, hundreds of pounds weekly were spent upon bonfires of sulphur in the streets of Cairo, a method of disinfection more likely to drive off demons than to destroy the comma bacillus in the drinking-water!

In mediæval, Jacobean, and Georgian medicine, fumigation was a favourite remedy. Every one, for example, is familiar with the old-fashioned treatment of fainting by burning feathers under the nose. And perfumes and aromatics in general were widely used in the medicine of those days, as the following extract from Salmon’s “Dispensatory” (1696) shows:

“Balsamum Apoplecticum Horstii, Apoplectick Balsam of Horstius.

“Take of the Oils of Nutmegs ℥i, of white Amber rectified ℥ʃ, Roses (commonly called Adeps Rosarum) of Cinnamon A. ℈i., of Lavender, of Marjoram A. grs. xv. of Benjamin, of Rue A. ℈ʃ of Cloves, of Citrons A. grs. iv. Mix all well together, then add Ambergrise ʒʃ, Oriental Civet ℈iv., Choice Musk ʒi. Mix all according to Art, to the just consistence of a Balsam.

“Salmon. The Oil of Nutmegs is that made by expression, all the rest are Chymical. Horstius saith, that in the whole Republick of Medicine, there is scarcely found an Apoplectick Balsam more illustrious for Fame, more noble for Virtue, more worthy for Honour, more ready for Help, and more fragrant for smell, than this. It chears and comforts all the spirits, natural, vital, and animal, by anointing the extremities of the Nostrils and the Pulses. It cures Convulsions, Palsies, Numbness, and other Diseases proceeding of cold.”

The modern physician may think this Balsam “apoplectick” in a sense never dreamt of by its author; nevertheless he must also sigh for the faith that believed all those wonders.

Here is another from the same source for “the strengthening of memory”:

“Balsamum Maemonicus (sic) Sennerti. Balsam for the loss of Memory.

“℞ of the juices of Bawm, Basil, flowers of Sage, Lillies, Primroses, Rosemary, Lavender, Borrage, Broom, A. ℥ii.; Aqua Vitae, Water-lillies, Roses, Violets, A. ℥i.; Cubebs, Cardamoms, Grains of Paradise, yellow Sanders, Corpo balsamum, Orrice, Saffron, Savory, Peony, Tyme, A. ℥ʃ; Storax liquid and Calamita, Opopanax, Bdellium, Galbanum, Gum of Ivy, Labdanum, A. ʒvi.; Roots of Peony, long Birthwort, Oils of Turpentine, Spike, Costus, Juniper, Bays, Mastick, Baben, Lavender, A. ʒv. Pouder them that are to be poudered, then mix and distil in an Alembick, with a gradual fire; separate the Balsam from the Water.

“Salmon. In this we have put flowers of Sage instead of Mynica or Tamarisk: otherwise it is verbatim. It is a truly noble Cephalick, and it is reported to cause a perpetual memory, both Water and Balsom are excellent good against all cold Diseases: you may anoint the hinder part of the Head, the Nostrils and Ears therewith. Dose gut. iii. ad vi. This is that Balsam which Charles, Duke of Burgundy bought of an English Doctor for 10000 Florentines.”

It is to be noted, by the way, the odours do not “strengthen the memory” as a whole; what they do is to revive special memories.

The use of perfumes like camphor to ward off infection has long been in vogue. The pompous doctors of Hogarth’s time—just 200 years ago—carried walking-sticks the hollow handle of which formed a receptacle for camphor, musk, or other pungent substances, which they held to their noses when visiting patients, to guard against the smells that to them spelt infection. And the air of the Old Bailey used to be, and indeed still is, sweetened with herbs strewn on the Bench, lest the prisoner about to be condemned to death by the rope might return the compliment and sentence his judge to death by gaol-fever. To this day, also, herbs are strewn about the Guildhall on state and ceremonial occasions, an interesting survival.

Demoniac possession was also largely responsible for the nauseous and disgusting remedies of which early medicine, both among the folk and among the more educated medical men, was very fond.

Paracelsus was a great believer in such concoctions, one of which, zebethum occidentale, was his own invention. Fortunately I am not compelled to divulge the constitution of this remarkable remedy. All I need say is that it was by no means the “cassia, sandal-buds, and stripes of labdanum” of Browning’s “Paracelsus”!

Those unspeakable medicaments were (and are still) sometimes applied externally, sometimes administered internally. One of the most absurd variants of this class was the holding of divers foulsmelling mixtures under the patient’s nose for the cure of hysteria, the idea being that the stench would repel the “mother” from the patient’s throat, whither it had wandered through sheer boredom and lack of interest elsewhere.

Nevertheless, out of these most absurd and to us meaningless methods of treatment modern medicine has here and there selected remedies which experiment and experience have proved to be of value; valerian, for example, which is still largely employed for hysterical conditions, and asafœtida (popularly named “devil’s dung”).

As a matter of fact, many pungent, strong-smelling substances are powerful cardiac and muscular stimulants.

Nor must we overlook the carminatives, the pleasantly smelling dill, aniseed, rue and peppermint, the very names of which bring to our minds the sweetness of old country places and the efforts, not always vain, to quiet screaming country babies! Well are they named the carminatives, acting as they do “like a charm.”

In the Æneid we are told how once upon a time his divine mother was revealed to pious Æneas by a heavenly odour. And although Lucian intimates that the gods themselves enjoyed the smell of incense, yet, according to Elliot Smith, the real object of incense-burning was to impart the body-odour of the god to his worshippers. Something of the kind, whatever the primary motive may have been, must have been needed, one would imagine, to drown the unpleasant smells from the abattoirs in the temples where the sacrificial animals were slaughtered.

The wrath of the Lord God of the Hebrews after the Flood, it will be remembered, was appeased when he smelled the sweet savour of the burnt offerings of Noah on his emergence from the Ark. The sacrifice was, of course, the meal of the god, the flesh of bullocks, rams, doves, and what not, being spiritualised by the flames and so transformed into food a spirit could absorb. The Greek gods, it is true, refreshed themselves with such ethereal delicacies as nectar and ambrosia, but they were by no means indifferent to the square meal of roast beef so punctiliously provided for them by human purveyors. Homer is always careful to mention that, as often as a feast was toward, neither the gods nor the bards were forgotten, the former being fed before and the latter after the heroes themselves had been satisfied.

When, following the Persian division of the unseen world of spirits into good and bad, the idea of an evil-minded and consistently hostile god became popular, his odour was naturally enough the opposite of that of the kindly gods. And as in time he came to assume some of the attributes of the Roman di inferni, he, like the dragons of an even greater antiquity, sported the sulphury odour of his underground dwelling.