238 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA 



at once forgotten. It is true that in the books 

 smell is classified along with taste, as being much 

 lower or less intellectual than sight and hearing, 

 for the reason (scarcely a valid one) that there 

 must be actual contact of the organ of smell with 

 the object smelt, or a material emanation from, 

 and portion of, such object, although the object 

 itself might be miles away beyond the sight or 

 even beyond the horizon. The light of nature is 

 enough to show how false the arrangement is that 

 places smell and taste together, as much lower 

 and widely apart from sight and hearing. Bather 

 the extreme delicacy of the olfactory nerve, raises 

 smell to the rank of an intellectual sense, but very 

 little below the two first and higher senses. And 

 yet, while sights and sounds are retained and can 

 be reproduced at will, and their phantasms are 

 like the reality, an odor has no phantasm in the 

 brain; or, to be very exact, the phantasm of an 

 odor, or its presentment or representation, is so 

 faint and quickly gone when any effort is made to 

 recover it, that, compared with the distinct and 

 abiding presentments of sights and sounds, it is 

 as nothing. Imagine, for example, that you had 

 often seen Windsor Castle, and knew a great deal 

 about it, its history, its noble appearance, which 

 will look familiar to you when you see it again and 

 affect you pleasantly as in the past ; and that yet 

 you could not see it with the mind's eye, but that 

 when, after a recent visit, you tried to see it men- 

 tally, nothing but a formless, dim, whitish patch 



