240 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA 



This approach in ourselves to the recovery of a 

 strong or familiar smell, this dim white patch, to 

 speak in metaphor, the ghost of a phantasm of a 

 smell, seems to have misled the philosophers into 

 the idea that we can mentally reproduce odors. 

 Bain, as 1 have said, contradicts himself, and 

 therefore, excepting in the sentence I have quoted, 

 must be put down among those who are against 

 me; and with him a*e McCosh, Bastian, Luys, 

 Ferrier, and others wh-o write on the brain and the 

 mind. Do they copy from each other ! It is very 

 odd that they all tell us that we know very little 

 about the sense of smell, and prove it by affirming 

 that we can recall the sensations produced by 

 odors, in some cases quoting the poet : 



Odozfs, -when sweet violets sicken, 

 Live within the sense they quicken. 



I was seriously alarmed at the beginning of this 

 inquiry by reading in McCosh, "When the organs 

 of taste and smell, supposed by Ferrier to be at 

 the back of the head, are diseased or out of order, 

 the reproduction of the corresponding sensations 

 may be indistinct." So indistinct was the repro- 

 duction in my own case, even of the smell of coffee, 

 that after reading this passage I began to fear 

 that my own brain had misled me, and so, to sat- 

 isfy myself on the point, I consulted others, friends 

 and acquaintances, who all began trying to recall 

 the sensations produced on them by the odors they 

 were most familiar with. The result of their 



