278 ON THE SENSES. 



the liound. Like the latter, both of you obey the incitement produced "by the 

 nerves of smell; in most cases, it is true, you can refrain from satisfying your 

 desire, but just of this desire you cannot free yourself, whether you be one of 

 the strong or the frail. When the new-born child grasps at its mother's breast, 

 and tries to suck it, as it also does with every finger offered it, you cannot avoid 

 supposing a human, inborn instinct, and attributing to it that inconceivable 

 action so beneficial to the child. The grown-up man who grasps at the odor- 

 ous meal differs from the new-born chdd only in that he understands bia 

 action ; the desire itself and the action resulting from it are as necessary conse- 

 quences of the working upon the soul of the singularly excited nerves of 

 smell, as is the child's grasping at and sucking its mother's teat? The slavish 

 dependence of our soul upon the impressions of the sense of smell is very 

 clearly evinced by the well-known fact that the same food, the flavor of which 

 seems to you delicious, and invites you to eat when you are hungry, disgusts 

 you in a state of satiety, so that the strongest will can scarcely induce you to 

 eat of it. The replenishing of your stomach and the saturation of your blood 

 •with nourishing matter so much changes the disposition of your soul that it 

 reacts upon the impressions of smell in a quite opposite way to its action in 

 hours of hunger, and obstinately rejects what it previously desired, commanding 

 your organs to convey it to the alimentary canal. You say you want to follow 

 no more the odor of the food when you have eaten enough ; but this freedom 

 of will is not a whit better than that of the fox who did not want the unap- 

 proachable grapes — than that which makes you grasp after food when hungry. 

 How slavishly bending and Avinding does onv disposition Ibllow the lead of the 

 nose in its various smelling exercises. A habitual smoker is a hypochondriac 

 when deprived of his cigar; with the smoke he scatters his grief and cares to 

 the winds ; the flavor of coffee opens the sluices of eloquence and all the gates 

 of the heart to the matron, while the tender fragrance of flowers charms forth 

 a thousand sweet emotions in the soul of the maiden ; the smell of a corpse op- 

 presses our breast and fills us with horror, just as the odor of balmy incense 

 inspires us with pious exaltation. A profound recognition of this dependence 

 of our disposition upon the impressions of smell is involved in the superstition 

 of the ancients who sought to propitiate their gods, whom they imaged to them- 

 selves purely human, by the odor of burned sacrifices, which odor, of course, we 

 would not include among the pleasant ones — a superstition which even now, 

 though in an altered form, finds its expression in the incense burnings of the 

 Catholics. How often does it happen that an accidental impression of smell, 

 such as we remember having felt another time under certain circumstances, 

 becomes the cause of a long migration of the soul through the events of the 

 past, deploying before us a long series of pleasant or gloomy pictures, and thus 

 determining for a time the activity of our soul. But these physiological sketches 

 may suflice; in drawing them we had no other object in view than to awaken 

 in our readers the desire of becoming more closely acquainted Avith the tyrant 

 whose mysterious influence so powerfully rules our spirit. Unfortunately, how- 

 ever, the physiology of the sense of smell still occupies an exceedingly low 

 place, considerably below that occupied by the physiology of the other senses, 

 so that we can satisfy that desire only in a very impi'rfect degree. We not only 

 have no idea of what passes in the nerve of smdl while it produces a sensa- 

 tion of smell in the brain, no idea of the way in which that nerve becomes 

 affected in the cuticle of the nose, but we have also not the slightest knowledge 

 of the external irritation which causes that affection, or of the qualities of sub- 

 stances which render them odorous. While, as regards the senses of sight 

 and hearing, and also that of touch, as above treated, we possess the exact 

 physical knowledge of the external agencies Avhich the nerves of the eye, of 

 the ear, and of the skin react upon, while the laws of the oscillations of the 

 luminous ether, of the velocity and extent of its waves, of the vibrations of sound. 



