Smell can bring as certainly and as irresistibly as music emotions of all sorts to the mind.
In this same category we may place the dusty smell of a dry hay-loft, which is curiously like that of bitter almonds and hydrocyanic acid. It has a sensation like ghostly fingers fumbling about your neck with a threat, half playful, half serious, of suffocation. And, curiously enough, the mental feeling of throttling fingers is not amiss. Prussic acid kills by paralysing the respiratory centres.
Let us get out into fresh air again! The sun is shining. A gentle breeze from the west is snowing the lawn with fragrant hawthorn blossoms. I catch a whiff of delicate lilac, and see coming towards me over the grass a slender figure in white....
And so we close with the perfumes of the spring, sunshine, and beauty.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The impulse of which this study of olfaction is the outcome emanated from Sir St. Clair Thomson, who three years ago handed me for my edification and growth in knowledge the Essai d’Olfactique Physiologique, a Thèse de Bruxelles, by A. Heyninx, dated 1919.
In addition to that work the following have been utilised, for the scientific side of the subject at all events:—
Poncelet, P. P. Chimie du Goût et de l’Odorat, etc. Paris. 1755.
Parker, G. H. Smell, Taste, and Allied Senses in the Vertebrates. n.d.
Deite, C. Manual of Toilet Soap-Making. Eng. Trans., 2nd ed. London. 1921.