48 



so that whilst always a law, it is always the exception, for 

 although the heredity of the great majority of the 

 characteristics is universally acknowledged, the aggregate of 

 all the characteristics is never realised. 



Smell and taste are so nearly related that I shall briefly 

 consider them together. The first of these senses is much 

 more acute in some of the lower animals than in man, and 

 in the latter it is very much a matter of race. Dogs are 

 generally regarded as valuable on account of their acuteness 

 of smell, which is certainly hereditary. This peculiarity is 

 also inherited by all the carnivorous animals, and by 

 numerous insects. The savage races of men may be said to 

 be allied to the lower animals by the peculiar acuteness of 

 smell by which they are distinguished. " In North America 

 the Indians can follow their enemies or their game by the 

 scent, and in the Antilles the maroon negroes distinguish by 

 the scent a white man's trail from a negro's." 1 In fact the 

 whole negro race has this sense extraordinarily developed. 

 Amongst the white races the sense varies, as the others do, 

 in point of sensitiveness or olfactory obtuseness, in every 

 possible degree, and we must all be acquainted with families 

 in which the sense is most acutely developed, and with 

 others who are scarcely able to discern one smell from 

 another. The idiosyncracies frequently associated with the 

 sense of smell are also very interesting ; but whether in the 

 lower animals or in man whether of the nature of degree 

 or of idiosyncrasy all the phenomena of the sense of smell, 

 whether innate or acquired, are preserved and transmitted 

 by heredity. 



As in the case of smell, so with taste ; its varieties, whether 

 specific or individual, are hereditarily transmissible. Burdach 

 1 Dictionnaire des Sciences Medicaks. 



