72 SMELLING. 



system ; and as the animal works by instinct, which 

 is an innate property, like the common properties 

 of matter, and mind works by experience, that is, 

 by successive portions of knowledge received from 

 without, through the medium of the powers of ob- 

 servation, it follows that those tastes and sensations 

 are less susceptible of being educated or improved 

 than any of our other powers ; and as we say of a 

 dull fellow, who comes (as is sometimes the case) 

 idealess from school, " a college education is thrown 

 away upon them." 



The sense of smelling, though some of the plea- 

 sures that it gives us are very delightful, and some 

 of its warnings are most wholesome and necessary, 

 has its immediate excitement so much out of the 

 way of the other senses, that the eye, the ear, the 

 hand, and even the palate cannot cross-question it ; 

 so that we do not fully understand its testimony, 

 and therefore cannot do very much towards im- 

 proving it. Yet it does admit of some more im- 

 provement than the sense of tasting ; and it is pos- 

 sible, nay likely, that our perception of odours is a 

 different matter altogether from that of mere ani- 

 mals. The vulture and the raven scent carrion, and 

 the bloodhound follows on the slot, in cases where 

 the human nose gives not a jot of information ; but 

 the vulture would instantly quit a bed of roses for a 

 rotten carcass, and the bloodhound would forsake 

 all the perfumes of Arabia in order to gnaw a bone, 

 although he had to scrape that bone out of the dirtiest 

 corner of the court-yard. No doubt the sense of 

 smell in man goes so far hand in hand with the 

 merely animal process of getting nourishment ; for, 

 as the proverb says, "a hungry man smells meat 

 far;" and everybody must have felt how grateful 

 the smell of the kitchen is before dinner, and how 

 intolerable just after. But still the sense of smell- 

 ing is not, as is probably the case with that of tast- 

 ing, wholly subservient to the animal process of 



