A NEGLECTED SUBJECT 89 



of mind, a student above everything of the human 

 subject — how had it come about that he had over- 

 looked so important a matter, that he was so grossly 

 ignorant about man's sense of smell? That others 

 were just as ignorant he soon found, nor could he 

 get any enlightenment from such books as were 

 accessible to him. But he still kept the matter in 

 his mind, and a few years later when he retired from 

 the army and came home to settle down near London, 

 one of his first steps was to go to the British Museum 

 to look the subject up. But for all his looking he 

 could find nothing. " It is," he said, " a neglected 

 subject, and some day I may be able to write a book 

 on it, as I have some very curious facts I picked up 

 in India to begin with." 



And that's all, alas ! When I hinted that it would 

 interest me to hear something about the curious facts 

 he had picked up, he didn't respond. At present, he 

 said, his mind and time were wholly taken up with 

 certain pathological problems which had a singular 

 attraction for him, and he was deeply interested in 

 his work at the hospitals, so that the subject of smell 

 would have to wait a year or two, or three. 



Two or three years later he died. 



The moral of this story is that it is useless to try 

 to " look up " the subject of the sense of smell in 

 the libraries. One must shake off the oppression, the 

 curse of books, the delusion that they contain all 

 knowledge, so that to observe and reflect for our- 

 selves is no longer necessary. It is all there — all we 

 want — in the British Museum, so that these special 



