The Sense of Smell 



foretell the squall ; the bird of prey, with its 

 incomparably long sight, sees from high in 

 the clouds the Field-mouse squatting on the 

 ground; the blinded Bats guide their flight 

 without injury to themselves amid Spallan- 

 zani's 1 inextricable maze of threads; the Car- 

 rier-pigeon, though moved a hundred leagues 

 from home, infallibly regains his cote across 

 immensities which he has never traversed un- 

 aided; within the limits of her humbler flight, 

 a Bee, the Chalicodoma, 2 also spans the un- 

 known, accomplishes a long journey and re- 

 turns to her mass of cells. 



The man who has never seen a Dog hunt- 

 ing for truffles does not know one of the finest 

 achievements of the sense of smell. Absorbed 

 in its functions, the animal trots along, with 

 its nose to the wind, at a moderate pace. It 

 stops, questions the ground with its nostrils, 

 scratches for a few seconds, without undue 

 excitement, and looks up at its master: 



"Here we are," it seems to say, "here we 



Abbe Lazaro Spallanzani (1729-99), an early 

 experimenter in natural history and author of a num- 

 ber of important works on the circulation of the blood, 

 on digestion, on generation and on microscopic ani- 

 mals. Cf. The Hunting Wasps: chap. xix. Trans- 

 lator's Note. 



2 Cf. The Mason-Bees, passim. Translator's Note. 

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