FRANKINCENSE AND MYRRH 101 
tongue and that of mice, may turn out to have an 
actual depressing effect, which may be emphasized 
by association if they call up the memories of the 
fatigue and stupefaction induced by organic 
particles in crowded rooms and filthy streets. 
It is usually said that man’s pleasure in the 
fragrant and the palatable has no correlated zsthetic 
emotion like that which accompanies looking at 
the beautiful or listening to music. But we doubt 
the accuracy of this hard-and-fast statement, and 
are inclined to think that the difference is in degree, 
not in kind. One of the difficulties is in trying to 
discriminate between the immediate effect of certain 
fragrances and that of the pleasant associations 
which they arouse. And again, while we agree, 
of course, with Professor Stout that “smells are 
not adapted to ideal revival in serial succession as 
sounds and sights are,” and therefore do not figure 
in those trains of ideas which bulk so largely in our 
mental life, it is not true to our personal experience 
to say that man has no olfactory memory. Civiliza- 
tion has staked so much on eye and ear, that man’s 
sense of smell seems to be on the down grade. But 
one hopes that this is still rather individual than 
racial, that is, rather modificational than variational, 
and that the growing love for gardens, for instance, 
may do something to counteract the exhaustion 
of the sense by tobacco and petrol. One of the 
hints that we get from Nature is that a fundamental 
secret of progressive evolution lies in a broadening 
and deepening appropriation of the complex system 
