The Senses and the Mind

by Anonymous

to forget the trials of life, and muse upon a still brighter world, where the flowers perish not, where storms come not, and where winter is unknown. Thus, to our bodily health do our senses administer; and thus the sense of smell calls us from the close room of the populous city, into the fresh air of the country—from the crowded town,

"Where houses thick and sewers annoy the air,"

to issue forth on a summer's morn, and breathe the pure air redolent of sweetest odours.

When overpoweringly offensive effluvia disgust us, we endeavour to stop our breath—we breathe at protracted intervals, take in as little air as possible, and endeavour to escape from the infected locality; but do we flee away from the gale bearing the scent of the honey-suckle, the bean-field, or the new-mown hay? It is, indeed, rather to our pleasures, to our mental enjoyment, to our delight, or to our disgust and abhorrence, that our sense of smell administers. We depend little upon it for our discrimination between things acting as poison, and things nutritious or wholesome. How pleasant is the smell of laurel-water or prussic acid—how dull and insipid the smell of wheaten flour! We must not, then, always be guided by our sense of smell, although in general it serves us as a monitor.

The sense of smell is intimately combined with that of taste; indeed, it is a powerful auxiliary to it, for, as a learned writer well observes, "taste, without the aid of smell, would be very vague in its indications, and limited in its range." Nevertheless, savage people, in whom the sense of smell is far more acute than in civilized races, do not appear to possess a greater refinement of taste—indeed, what the former regard as delicacies would be rejected by the latter with abhorrence. Most quadrupeds possess the sense of smell in far greater perfection than man, and are evidently influenced by it in their choice or rejection of food. In the carnivorous tribes this sense is, perhaps, at its highest ratio, and many pursue their prey guided by their olfactory organs alone.

Certain odours are agreeable to some few animals, irrespective of food; but on this point our range of information is limited. The cat delights in the scent of valerian, and some other herbs, although they are not among the articles of this animal's diet; yet to the cat and the dog, the odour of the sweetest flowers yields no pleasure. Birds, in general, are endowed with the sense of smell in a far lower degree than quadrupeds, and the olfactory organs are far less developed. Birds of prey are guided by their keen powers of vision, and, indeed, if we are to trust to the experiments of Audubon, the sense of smell even in the carrion-loving vulture, contrary to the opinion of the ancients, as well as of modern naturalists, is at a low ratio; for, as he asserts, the stuffed skin of an animal will attract a vulture from its "pride of place," in the upper regions of the air. It is true that this assertion has been contradicted by Mr. Waterton, but it is again confirmed by the experiments and observations of Mr. Bachman, which are recorded in Loudon's Magazine of Natural History, viii. 167; and M. Levuillant seems to have considered that it is by the eye chiefly, if not exclusively, that the vulture obtains its disgusting food. The following observations from the proceedings of the Zoological Society will be here, perhaps, not unacceptable:—

March 14th, 1837.—"A paper was read on the habits of the Vultur Aura, by Mr. W. Sells, with notes of the dissections of the heads of two specimens, by Mr. R. Owen. The writer states, that this bird is found in great abundance in the island of Jamaica, where it is known by the name of John Crow; and so valuable are its services in the removal of carrion and animal filth, that the legislature have imposed a fine of £5 upon any one destroying it within a stated distance of the principal towns. Its ordinary food is carrion, but when pressed hard with hunger, it will seize upon young fowls, rats, and snakes. After noticing the highly offensive odour emitted from the eggs of this bird when broken, Mr. Sells relates the following instances which have come under his own personal observation, for the purpose of proving that the Vultur Aura possesses the sense of smell in a very acute degree.

"It has been questioned whether the vulture discovers its food by means of the organ of smell or that of sight. I apprehend that its powers of vision are very considerable, and of most important use; but that it is principally from highly organized olfactories that it so speedily receives intelligence of where the savoury morsel is to be found, will plainly appear by the following facts. In hot climates, the burial of the dead commonly takes place in about twenty-four hours after death, and that necessarily, so rapidly does decomposition take place. On one occasion, I had to make a post mortem examination of a body within twenty hours after death, in a mill-house completely concealed, and while so engaged the roof of the mill-house was thickly studded with these birds. Another instance was that of an old patient and much valued friend, who died at midnight; the family had to send for necessaries for the funeral to Spanish Town, distant thirty miles, so that the interment could not take place until noon of the second day, or thirty-six hours after his decease, long before which time—and a most painful sight it was—the ridge of the shingled roof of his house, a large mansion of but one floor, had a number of these melancholy heralds of death perched thereon, beside many more which had settled in trees in its immediate vicinity. In these cases, the birds must have been directed by smell alone, as sight was totally out of the question.

"In opposition to the above opinion, it has been stated by Mr. Audubon, that vultures and other birds of prey possess the sense of smell in a very inferior degree to carnivorous quadrupeds, and that, so far from guiding them to their prey from a distance, it affords them no indication of its presence even when at hand. In confirmation of this opinion, he relates, that he stuffed the skin of a deer full of hay, and placed it in a field; in a few minutes a vulture lighted near it, and directly proceeded to attack it, but finding no eatable food, he at length quitted it. And he further relates, that a dead dog was concealed in a narrow ravine, twenty feet below the surface of the earth around it, and filled with briers and high canes; that many vultures were seen sailing over the spot, but none discovered it. I may remark upon the above experiments, that, in the first case, the stag was doubtless seen by the birds, but it does not follow that they might not also have smelt the hide, although inodorous to the human nose; in the second case, the birds had been undoubtedly attracted by the smell, however embarrassed they might have been by the concealment of the object which caused it. I have, in many hundred instances, seen the vulture feeding upon small objects under rocks, bushes, and in other situations, where it was utterly impossible that the bird could have discovered them but through the sense of smell; and we are to recollect, that the habit of the vulture is that of soaring aloft in the air, and not that of foraging upon the ground."

To this account are appended the details of a minute comparison, by professor Owen, of the olfactory nerves and the olfactory branch of the fifth pair in the Vultur Aura, with those of the common turkey and the goose. The learned anatomist concludes by saying, "the above notes show that the vulture has a well-developed organ of smell, but whether he finds his prey by that sense alone, or in what degree it assists, anatomy is not so well calculated to explain as experiment."