THEORISING IN THE DARK 63 



comfortable circumstances in an equable temperature. 

 Again, Humboldt relates that the Peruvian Indians 

 distinguished between the footprints of their own 

 people and those of whites and negroes. 



There are, besides, the aborigines of America 

 from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego, the Africans, the 

 Polynesians, the Malays, the inhabitants of a thou- 

 sand oceanic islands, the Asiatics. I suppose that at 

 least a hundred thousand Europeans have written 

 books about China, Hindustan, and all the other 

 countries of that vast continent, but I doubt if there 

 is a chapter in the hundred thousand books dealing 

 with the sense of smell in any Asiatic people compared 

 with ours. 



Having, then, few or no facts to go upon, we are 

 very much in the dark about this sense; we can only 

 suppose that, if it be accepted as a principle that its 

 decay proceeds pari passu with the increase in the 

 value of vision and the improvements in our artificial 

 condition of life, the decline has been greater in the 

 town-dwelling and comfortably-off classes in Eng- 

 land during the last two centuries than in the 

 previous two thousand years. 



To dogmatise on such a subject would be ridiculous; 

 we are even more in the dark than I have made it 

 appear. By watching a man and subtly drawing him 

 out, we can penetrate through his mask and dis- 

 cover his secret and real mind, but we can't get at 

 the real state of his sense of smell. Each one of us 

 knows his own, and many of us only know it "in 

 a way." Wherefore I'm glad to get away from this 



