2836. The sensation of the electrical relations is called Smelling. The olfactory sense is an air-sense. We smell nothing but the electricity, and neither the contact, nor the impressions, &c. of the particles that find their way into the nose. These particles would have no effect upon the nasal organ, if they did not stand in an electrical relation unto it.
2837. Now, the electrical bodies in nature are the resins or Inflammables. What salt is for the gustatory, that is resin for the olfactory sense. The nose is an electrical, a resinous organ.
2838. In like manner the solubility of bodies in the air is as requisite for smell, as that in water is for taste. The water is the menstruum of the sapid, as the air is of odorous, bodies; and this indeed of necessity, because water and air are the antetypes of these mineral classes.
2839. In order to be an odorous body or object of smell, the resin must resolve itself into air, or become aeriform. Aeriform resin is æthereal oil. Bodies such as those which part rapidly with their electricity, substances containing hydrogen, æthereal oils and burnt spirits, are the usual objects appreciated by the olfactory sense.
2840. The hydrogenous body is therefore provided with a sweet scent. Most bodies which are evolved by fermentation, in so far as they are electrical, are odoriferous. Most blossoms smell agreeably, because they secrete aerial matters.
2841. The products of putrefaction emit a fetid odour, because they indicate the presence not of aerial, but aqueous and terrestrial matters. Nearly all animal bodies stink, besides many secretions of the sexual parts, because they belong to the vegetable nature.
2842. The objects of taste have their residence in what is inorganic, but those of smell, as being objects of a higher sense, have it in the vegetable kingdom. The succeeding or auditory sense has the animal kingdom for its object, while the eye scans the universe.
2843. The nose is in every respect an electrical organ; it is an electrophore, or rather a battery consisting of numerous plates. Of the truth of this, its numerous tortuous passages and laminated bones are striking proofs.
2844. That the nose consists of a great number of blood-vessels, as well as of arteriose olfactory nerves, is quite commensurate with its character or signification, as being a higher pulmonary organ.
2845. The objects of the three vegetative senses are the three elements of the planet, earth, water and air; in the first of these reside the relation of the gravity, rest, and crystallization; in the last the relation of the electricity; in the water that of the chemism. The sense of feeling is an earth-sense, that of taste a salt-sense, that of smell a resin-sense.