In the absence of all suggestion of personal or animal odors, in its most exquisite forms in the fragrance of flowers, olfactory sensations are still very frequently of a voluptuous character. Mantegazza has remarked that it is a proof of the close connection between the sense of smell and the sexual organs that the expression of pleasure produced by olfaction resembles the expression of sexual pleasures.[[73]] Make the chastest woman smell the flowers she likes best, he remarks, and she will close her eyes, breathe deeply, and, if very sensitive, tremble all over, presenting an intimate picture which otherwise she never shows, except perhaps to her lover. He mentions a lady who said: "I sometimes feel such pleasure in smelling flowers that I seem to be committing a sin."[[74]] It is really the case that in many persons—usually, if not exclusively, women—the odor of flowers produces not only a highly pleasurable, but a distinctly and specifically sexual, effect. I have met with numerous cases in which this effect was well marked. It is usually white flowers with heavy, penetrating odors which exert this influence. Thus, one lady (who is similarly affected by various perfumes, forget-me-nots, ylang-ylang, etc.) finds that a number of flowers produce on her a definite sexual effect, with moistening of the pudenda. This effect is especially produced by white flowers like the gardenia, tuberose, etc. Another lady, who lives in India, has a similar experience with flowers. She writes: A scent to cause me sexual excitement must be somewhat heavy and penetrating. Nearly all white flowers so affect me and many Indian flowers with heavy, almost pungent scents. (All the flower scents are quite unconnected with me with any individual.) Tuberose, lilies of the valley, and frangipani flowers have an almost intoxicating effect on me. Violets, roses, mignonette, and many others, though very delicious, give me no sexual feeling at all. For this reason the line, 'The lilies and languors of virtue for the roses and raptures of vice' seems all wrong to me. The lily seems to me a very sensual flower, while the rose and its scent seem very good and countrified and virtuous. Shelley's description of the lily of the valley, 'whom youth makes so fair and passion so pale,' falls in much more with my ideas. "I can quite understand," she adds, "that leather, especially of books, might have an exciting effect, as the smell has this penetrating quality, but I do not think it produces any special feeling in me." This more sensuous character of white flowers is fairly obvious to many persons who do not experience from them any specifically sexual effects. To some people lilies have an odor which they describe as sexual, although these persons may be quite unaware that Hindu authors long since described the vulvar secretion of the Padmini, or perfect woman, during coitus, as "perfumed like the lily that has newly burst."[[75]] It is noteworthy that it was more especially the white flowers—lily, tuberose, etc.—which were long ago noted by Cloquet as liable to cause various unpleasant nervous effects, cardiac oppression and syncope.[[76]]
When we are concerned with the fragrances of flowers it would seem that we are far removed from the human sexual field, and that their sexual effects are inexplicable. It is not so. The animal and vegetable odors, as, indeed, we have already seen, are very closely connected. The recorded cases are very numerous in which human persons have exhaled from their skins—sometimes in a very pronounced degree—the odors of plants and flowers, of violets, of roses, of pineapple, of vanilla. On the other hand, there are various plant odors which distinctly recall, not merely the general odor of the human body, but even the specifically sexual odors. A rare garden weed, the stinking goosefoot, Chenopodium vulvaria, it is well known, possesses a herring brine or putrid fish odor—due, it appears, to propylamin, which is also found in the flowers of the common white thorn or mayflower (Cratægus oxyacantha) and many others of the Rosaceæ—which recalls the odor of the animal and human sexual regions.[[77]] The reason is that both plant and animal odors belong chemically to the same group of capryl odors (Linnæus's Odores hircini), so called from the goat, the most important group of odors from the sexual point of view. Caproic and capryl acid are contained not only in the odor of the goat and in human sweat, and in animal products as many cheeses, but also in various plants, such as Herb Robert (Geranium robertianum), and the Stinking St. John's worts (Hypericum hircinum), as well as the Chenopodium. Zwaardemaker considers it probable that the odor of the vagina belongs to the same group, as well as the odor of semen (which Haller called odor aphrodisiacus), which last odor is also found, as Cloquet pointed out, in the flowers of the common berberry (Berberis vulgaris) and in the chestnut. A very remarkable and significant example of the same odor seems to occur in the case of the flowers of the henna plant, the white-flowered Lawsonia (Lawsonia inermis), so widely used in some Mohammedan lands for dyeing the nails and other parts of the body. "These flowers diffuse the sweetest odor," wrote Sonnini in Egypt a century ago; "the women delight to wear them, to adorn their houses with them, to carry them to the baths, to hold them in their hands, and to perfume their bosoms with them. They cannot patiently endure that Christian and Jewish women shall share the privilege with them. It is very remarkable that the perfume of the henna flowers, when closely inhaled, is almost entirely lost in a very decided spermatic odor. If the flowers are crushed between the fingers this odor prevails, and is, indeed, the only one perceptible. It is not surprising that so delicious a flower has furnished Oriental poetry with many charming traits and amorous similes." Such a simile Sonnini finds in the Song of Songs, i. 13-14.[[78]]
The odor of semen has not been investigated, but, according to Zwaardemaker, artificially produced odors (like cadaverin) resemble it. The odor of the leguminous fenugreek, a botanical friend considers, closely approaches the odor given off in some cases by the armpit in women. It is noteworthy that fenugreek contains cumarine, which imparts its fragrance to new-mown hay and to various flowers of somewhat similar odor. On some persons these have a sexually exciting effect, and it is of considerable interest to observe that they recall to many the odor of semen. "It seems very natural," a lady writes, "that flowers, etc., should have an exciting effect, as the original and by far the pleasantest way of love-making was in the open among flowers and fields; but a more purely physical reason may, I think, be found in the exact resemblance between the scent of semen and that of the pollen of flowering grasses. The first time I became aware of this resemblance it came on me with a rush that here was the explanation of the very exciting effect of a field of flowering grasses and, perhaps through them, of the scents of other flowers. If I am right, I suppose flower scents should affect women more powerfully than men in a sexual way. I do not think anyone would be likely to notice the odor of semen in this connection unless they had been greatly struck by the exciting effects of the pollen of grasses. I had often noticed it and puzzled over it." As pollen is the male sexual element of flowers, its occasionally stimulating effect in this direction is perhaps but an accidental result of a unity running through the organic world, though it may be perhaps more simply explained as a special form of that nasal irritation which is felt by so many persons in a hay-field. Another correspondent, this time a man, tells me that he has noted the resemblance of the odor of semen to that of crushed grasses. A scientific friend who has done much work in the field of organic chemistry tells me he associates the odor of semen with that produced by diastasic action on mixing flour and water, which he regards as sexual in character. This again brings us to the starchy products of the leguminous plants. It is evident that, subtle and obscure as many questions in the physiology and psychology of olfaction still remain, we cannot easily escape from their sexual associations.
H. Beauregard, Matière Médicale Zoölogique: Histoire des Drogues d'origine Animate, 1901.
Professor Plateau, of Ghent, has for many years carried on a series of experiments which would even tend to show that insects are scarcely attracted by the colors of flowers at all, but mainly influenced by a sense which would appear to be smell. His experiments have been recorded during recent years (from 1887) in the Bulletins de l'Académie Royale de Belgique, and have from time to time been summarized in Nature, e.g., February 5, 1903.