84 OLFACTORY HOLIDAYS 



seem to have received much, if any, attention in any 

 quarter. Now, years later, I find that it throws a 

 sudden bright light into a dim interior in which 

 I had been helplessly, hopelessly groping among 

 vaguely-seen mysterious objects or shapes standing 

 or moving about me. Let me hasten to say that it 

 was, and is, a vast interior, that the sudden light 

 fell upon and revealed only a small number of the 

 dimly-seen shapes about which I must write by-and- 

 by, but I think a good deal must be said first by 

 way of clearing the ground. 



We may take it that every object about us, 

 animated and inanimate, has a smell, although our 

 olfactories may not tell us so. We have only to 

 consult a dog to know that the atmosphere teems 

 with scents to which we are insensitive. But we find 

 that by giving a holiday, an idle time, to our olfac- 

 tories, they recover in some degree their lost or 

 hidden power. Thus, it is a well-known fact that 

 when a person has spent some hours in a deep cavern, 

 like the famous Mammoth Cave in Kentucky, where 

 in the great rocky chambers, miles under ground, 

 the still atmosphere is free from scent particles, on 

 emerging his nostrils are assailed with a hundred 

 smells — of the soil, of trees and bushes and grass and 

 every object around him. So sharp is the sensation 

 that it is actually painful in some cases. Again, on 

 landing after a sea voyage, the smell of the land and 

 of buildings is quite powerful, and we smell things 

 strongly too when we come down from a mountain. 

 Even after a day spent on the crest of the South 



