250 Idle Days in Patagonia. 



familiar, long untasted dish, flavoured, let me say 41 

 with some such abomination (to the English palate) 

 as cummin-seed or garlic ; some vegetable, or fruit, 

 wild or cultivated, that I never see in England, it 

 would not move me as I am moved by an odour, and 

 would perhaps give me less pleasure than a dish of 

 strawberries and cream. For in the flavour 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 ; therefore 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. Con- 

 sequently our inability to recall past flavours is not 

 felt as a loss, and no effort 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, compared 

 with the other senses, namely, because, like sight 

 and hearing, it is an intellectual sense, and because, 

 unlike sight and hearing, its sensations are for- 

 gotten ; and when after a long interval a forgotten 

 odour, once familiar and associated intimately with 

 the past, is again encountered, the sudden, unex- 

 pected recovery of a lost sensation affects us in 

 some such way as the accidental discovery of a store 

 of gold, hidden away by ourselves in some past 

 period of our life and forgotten ; or as it would 



