no VAGUE INTIMATIONS 



unknown kind — which affects us even at a distance 

 of a good many yards, and in that belief I rested 

 satisfied, finding comfort in it, until the idea of 

 smelling unconsciously was put forward, which 

 seemed to furnish a simpler, more understandable 

 explanation. And this explanation must hold the 

 field in my mind until a better one is found. 



It is true that nothing definite comes of it — that 

 these faint and vague intimations teU us only that 

 life, breathing animal life, is there, but as to the 

 nature of the life it tells us nothing. This may be 

 because our sense, even that unconscious sense of 

 smell which still survives in us, is too feeble now to 

 produce more than a sense of a living something, 

 we don't know what. 



This may not be so in the case of primitive man, 

 living a purely natural life — the life, let us say, of 

 the Kyans in the forests of Borneo, the wild people of 

 the Andaman Islands, the bushmen and pigmies in 

 Africa, and the savages of Tierra del Fuego — who 

 depend on their senses, smell as weU as sight and 

 hearing, for their livelihood and safety. But even 

 with us, I believe that in some persons, in cases of 

 atavism and in some pathological states, the lost 

 faculty may be restored. 



And here we come to the subject of antipathies — 

 a subject ruled out by the makers of physiological 

 and psychological books and from the Encyclopcedia 

 Britannica, which these same scientists edit — the 

 people who do not believe in what doesn't exist, 

 they having first made the rule that nothing exists 



