The Perfume of an Evening Primrose. 245 



things heard, be reproduced in the mind, but are 

 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. Rather 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 repro- 

 duced at will, and their phantasms are like the 

 reality, an odour has no phantasm in the brain ; or, 

 to be very exact, the phantasm of an odour, 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 mentally, 



