EDUCATING THE SENSE OF SMELL.
Dr. Piesse errs in saying that the sense of taste can and should be educated. It needs no educating; sweet is distinguished from sour, salt and bitter from the earliest infancy, and that is all there is to it.
The sense of smell, on the other hand, can and should be educated systematically. Kant's reason for saying that it is not worth cultivating was that, in populous regions, particularly, there are more disagreeable than agreeable odors. He might as well have advised against educating the eyes and the ears because in our cities there are more offensive sights and sounds than agreeable ones. An educated sense of smell objects to malodorous surroundings and therefore prompts sanitary reforms. Much has been done in this direction since the days of Kant. The next reform will be to absolutely demand clean, sweet air in schools, theaters, and concert halls.
The principal reason for educating the sense of smell is to protect us against the danger of eating spoiled food, and to enable us thoroughly to enjoy the countless pleasures of the table—dwelt on in this book—on which a good appetite depends. The significance of this was understood by Shakespeare when he wrote:
Now good digestion wait on appetite
And health on both.
Ants are the most intelligent of all insects. Their antennæ are organs of smell and so much is their world a world of odors that, as Sir John Lubbock ascertained, an ant accidentally born without antennæ seemed to be as helpless as a blind person among ourselves. Many mammals are greatly dependent on this sense, and there was a time when a large part of the human brain was assigned to its perceptions. More and more the impressions of sight gained on it. The process has gone too far; we must once more strengthen and develop our olfactory nerves and encourage the expansion of the olfactory region in the brain.
The way to do it has been dwelt on repeatedly in the preceding pages. I have taught several persons who were partly anosmic to learn after a short time to distinguish between different foods that had previously "tasted" alike to them; they simply followed my advice of breathing out slowly and consciously through the nose while eating. Keep those two words—particularly consciously—in mind. Never eat in an absent-minded way; and if you are a host or a hostess, please do not tell your guest interesting stories at the moment when he is trying to do justice to the good things you have placed before him!
Children should be told every time they bolt their food or candy that the pleasure of eating lies not in the swallowing of it, but in keeping it in the mouth as long as possible and breathing out through the nose. That will make epicures of them, able to tell good food from bad and thus escape many an illness.
How acute the sense of smell can be made is shown by the fact that it will perceive and distinguish the 1,300,000th part of a grain of attar of roses. It is said that the inmates of an asylum for the blind, whose other senses are sharpened by the loss of sight, can tell on entering a dining-room what viands are on the table.
De gustibus non est disputandum. True; we are all entitled to our likes and dislikes; but many "differences of taste" are simply differences in development and acuteness of the sense of smell. To those in whom this sense is blunted, sweet (unsalted) butter may seem insipid; but should they maintain that it is insipid?
To Turner a man once said he could not see in nature such colors as he used on his canvases. The great painter promptly replied: "Don't you wish you could?"
Epicures are usually born with a keen sense of smell. Once, in crossing a bleak pass in the Alps, I said to my companion: "I smell an orchid!" After considerable search we found it—a tiny blossom—some ten feet from the road. That orchid explains why I have written this book.