246 Idle Days in Patagonia. 



nothing but a formless, dim, whitish patch ap- 

 peared, only to disappear in an instant and come 

 no more. Such a case would represent our con- 

 dition with regard to even the strongest and most 

 familiar smells. Yet in spite of our inability to 

 recall them, we do distinctly make the effort ; and 

 in the case of some strong odour which we have 

 recently inhaled the mind mocks us with this faint 

 shadow of a phantasm ; and this vain, or almost 

 vain, effort of the mind, seems to show that odours in 

 some past period of our history were so much more 

 to us than they are now that they could be vividly 

 reproduced, and that this power has been lost, or, 

 at all events, is so weakened as to be of no use. 



I find that Bain, who makes different and con- 

 tradictory statements on this subject in his work on 

 the Senses and the Intellect, has the following 

 sentence, with which I agree : " By a great effort of 

 the mind, we may approach very near to the re- 

 covery of a smell that we have been extremely 

 familiar with, as, for example, the odour of coffee, 

 and if we were more dependent on ideas of smell, 

 we might succeed much better." A very big ?/, by 

 the way ; but it is probable that some savages, and 

 some individuals among us that have a very acute 

 sense of smell, do succeed much better. This sense 

 being so much more to dogs than to man, it is not 

 strange that they remember smells rather than 

 sights, and can reproduce the sensation of smells, 

 as their twitching and sniffing noses when they 

 dream seem to show. 



