SENSE OF SMELL IN MAN 61 



if a rabbit or mouse has crossed his track he is not 

 excited about it, and bits of carrion hidden in the 

 grass, and small local stenches, in which the dog 

 revels, are nothing to him. 



No doubt there is a vast difference in power in 

 the sense of smell in both these animals and in man; 

 nevertheless, I don't think so meanly of man's 

 olfactories as some physiologists appear to do. It 

 is a common idea, and is in the books, that man's 

 sense of smell is decayed; some writers have gone so 

 far as to describe it as obsolescent. 



Who, we may ask, is Man in this connection? 

 It would be nearer the truth to say that the more 

 civilised man becomes, or the more he secures him- 

 self against the forces of nature by improving his 

 conditions, the less important to his welfare does this 

 sense become. The dangers he is warned against by 

 smell in a state of nature have been removed artifici- 

 ally; in an environment in which the function of the 

 olfactories has been superseded, the inevitable result 

 is their decay. This is in accordance with Nature's 

 economical principle; she will not continue doing for 

 us what we have undertaken to do for ourselves, and 

 will cheerfully scrap the exquisite apparatus she has 

 been building up for our safety in thousands and 

 millions of years. 



When I see a lover of flowers and their perfumes 

 pressing a bunch of violets to her nose as if to drag 

 something out of them with her nose, to stimulate 

 by violence, as it were, by repeated sniffing inhala- 

 tions, a torpid sense the sense which she knows is 



