The Perfume of an Evening Primrose. 249 



odours does not affect us at all : we can, in imagi- 

 nation, uncork and sniff at cans of petroleum and 

 saturate our pocket-handkerchiefs with assafoetida 

 or carbolic acid, or walk behind adust-cart, or wade 

 through miles of fetid slime in some tropical morass, 

 or take up some mephitic animal, like the skunk, and 

 fondle it as we would a kitten, yet experience no 

 pain, and no sensation of nausea. We can, if we 

 like, call up all the sweet and abominable smells in 

 nature, just as Owen Glendower called spirits from 

 the vasty deep, but, like the spirits, they refuse to 

 come ; or they come not as smells but as ideas, so 

 that phosphuretted hydrogen causes no pain, and 

 frangipani no pleasure. We only know that smells 

 exist ; that we have roughly classified them as 

 fragrant, aromatic, fresh, ethereal, stimulating, acrid, 

 nauseous, and virulent ; that each of these generic 

 names includes a very large number of distinct 

 odours : we know them all because the mind has 

 taken note of the distinct character of each, and of 

 its effect on us, not because it has registered a sensa- 

 tion in our brain to be reproduced at will, as in the 

 case of something we have seen or heard. 



It is true that we are equally powerless to recall 

 tastes. Bain admits that "these sensations are 

 deficient as regards the power of being remem- 

 bered " ; but he did not discover the fact himself, 

 nor does he verify it from his own experience, 

 merely telling us that " Longet observes." But 

 taste is not an emotional sense. 1 know, for in- 

 stance, that if I were to partake of some once 



