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.”