PERFUME OF AN EVENING PEIMEOSE 243 



merely telling us that "Longet observes." But 

 taste is not an emotional sense. I know, for in- 

 stance, that if I were to partake of some once 

 familiar, long untasted dish, flavored, let me say, 

 with some such abomination (to the English pal- 

 ate) as cummin-seed or garlic; some vegetable, or 

 fruit, wild or cultivated, that I never see in Eng- 

 land, it would not move me as I am moved by an 

 odor, and would perhaps give me less pleasure 

 than a dish of strawberries and cream. For in 

 the flavor there is obvious contact with the organ 

 of taste; it is gross and inseparable from the 

 thing eaten to supply a bodily want, and gives a 

 momentary and purely animal gratification ; there- 

 fore to the mind it is not in the same category, but 

 very much lower than that invisible, immaterial 

 something that flies to us, not to give a sensuous 

 pleasure only, but also to lead, to warn, to instruct, 

 and call up before the mental eye bright images 

 of things unseen. Consequently our inability to 

 recall past flavors is not felt as a loss, and no ef- 

 fort is made to recover them; they are lost and 

 were not worth keeping. 



This, then, to my mind, is the reason that smell 

 is an emotional sense in so great a degree, com- 

 pared with the other senses, namely, because, 

 like sight and hearing, it is an intellectual sense, 

 and because, unlike sight and hearing, its sensa- 

 tions are forgotten ; and when after a long inter- 

 val a forgotten odor, once familiar and associated 

 intimately with the past, is again encountered, the 



