Ants are the most intelligent of all insects. Their antennæ are organs of smell and so much is their world a world of odors that, as Sir John Lubbock ascertained, an ant accidentally born without antennæ seemed to be as helpless as a blind person among ourselves. Many mammals are greatly dependent on this sense, and there was a time when a large part of the human brain was assigned to its perceptions. More and more the impressions of sight gained on it. The process has gone too far; we must once more strengthen and develop our olfactory nerves and encourage the expansion of the olfactory region in the brain.
The way to do it has been dwelt on repeatedly in the preceding pages. I have taught several persons who were partly anosmic to learn after a short time to distinguish between different foods that had previously "tasted" alike to them; they simply followed my advice of breathing out slowly and consciously through the nose while eating. Keep those two words—particularly consciously—in mind. Never eat in an absent-minded way; and if you are a host or a hostess, please do not tell your guest interesting stories at the moment when he is trying to do justice to the good things you have placed before him!
Children should be told every time they bolt their food or candy that the pleasure of eating lies not in the swallowing of it, but in keeping it in the mouth as long as possible and breathing out through the nose. That will make epicures of them, able to tell good food from bad and thus escape many an illness.
How acute the sense of smell can be made is shown by the fact that it will perceive and distinguish the 1,300,000th part of a grain of attar of roses. It is said that the inmates of an asylum for the blind, whose other senses are sharpened by the loss of sight, can tell on entering a dining-room what viands are on the table.
De gustibus non est disputandum. True; we are all entitled to our likes and dislikes; but many "differences of taste" are simply differences in development and acuteness of the sense of smell. To those in whom this sense is blunted, sweet (unsalted) butter may seem insipid; but should they maintain that it is insipid?
To Turner a man once said he could not see in nature such colors as he used on his canvases. The great painter promptly replied: "Don't you wish you could?"
Epicures are usually born with a keen sense of smell. Once, in crossing a bleak pass in the Alps, I said to my companion: "I smell an orchid!" After considerable search we found it—a tiny blossom—some ten feet from the road. That orchid explains why I have written this book.
COFFEE, TEA, AND TEMPERANCE.
A general educating of the sense of smell may not solve the temperance problem, but it will be a great help.
It would be a blessing if every liquor saloon in the country could be closed. Most of the whiskey and other strong drink sold—at an enormous profit—in these places is adulterated in ways which often make it infinitely more harmful than the pure article would be, under any circumstances. But the unadulterated is an evil, too, because it is usually drunk in excess.