Yet of all the senses none surely is so mysterious as that of smell. For, as we have shown, the nature of the emanations that stir it to activity is still unknown; the simple structure of its end-organ confronts us, like a sphinx, with silence; and after the reception of the stimulus in the olfactory lobe of the brain its further connections and communications still remain unsurveyed, albeit, as I have already so amply displayed, its effects upon the psyche are both wide and deep, at once obvious and subtle.
CHAPTER IX
DUST OF THE ROSE PETAL
By way of relief from the exacting mental strain of the last chapter, I have thought that the reader who has got this length might be grateful for something more simple, and so it is not altogether egotism that leads me to finish up with a few of the olfactory pictures I cherish.
Before proceeding with the subject-matter proper of the chapter, however, let me put in a plea for the conscious cultivation of the sense of smell. But little more, I take it, is needed in this way than to pay attention to the olfactory sensations that reach us, for the very fact of taking note of them is sufficient probably to increase the power and delicacy of olfaction, this being always the effect of the mental process known as attention.
Smell may thus be easily cultivated and improved, and with the increase in its appreciation of the world comes an enriching of the other sense-impressions that is quite surprising.
It is possible that there is no substance in the natural world entirely devoid of odour. At all events, after a time the amateur in smell may find himself able, like Rousseau, to perceive perfumes when other people do not notice any, and as a mark at which he can aim let it be said that when he finds himself able to distinguish streets from each other by their smell alone he has made some little progress in the art.
The innate acuteness of the sense varies widely in different people. Some go through life blunt to all but the coarser smells, while others are gifted with a sensitiveness as delicate almost as that of a macrosmatic animal. This is scarcely an exaggeration. I am acquainted with people—English people—who are able to recognise by olfaction not only different races and the two sexes, but even different persons. One of those sensitives informs me that to her the personal olfactory atmosphere is every whit as characteristic and unmistakable as the play of features or the carriage of the figure.
Another remarkable feat within the capacity of human macrosmatics, and one that seems almost incredible to the ordinary individual, is that of being able to distinguish the clothing of different persons by its aroma. Some can even recognise their own, a remarkable circumstance in view of the almost universal rule that each is anosmic to his own particular atmosphere.
It is true that we can get on quite well without smelling. Probably congenital anosmia is the least crippling of all sense-deprivations. But how much it enters into our enjoyment of life when we have once possessed it is shown by the blankness that attends its loss; we feel then as if a tint had been bleached out of the world.
At this juncture we may stay a moment to allude to the action of tobacco on olfaction. There are few people nowadays who would uphold King Jamie’s “Counterblaste,” wherein he denounces smoking as—