The Perfume of an Evening Primrose. 245 
things heard, be reproduced in the mind, but are 
at once forgotten. It is true that in the books 
smell is classified along with taste, as being much 
lower or less intellectual than sight and hearing, 
for the reason (scarcely a valid one) that there 
must be actual contact of the organ of smell with 
the object smelt, or a material emanation from, and 
portion of, such object, although the object itself 
might be miles away beyond the sight or even 
beyond the horizon. The light of nature is enough 
to show how false the arrangement is that places 
smell and taste together, as much lower and widely 
apart from sight and hearing. Rather the extreme 
delicacy of the olfactory nerve, raises smell to the 
rank of an intellectual sense, but very little below 
the two first and higher senses. And yet, while 
sights and sounds are retained and can be repro- 
duced at will, and their phantasms are like the 
reality, an odour has no phantasm in the brain; or, 
to be very exact, the phantasm of an odour, or its 
presentment or representation, is so faint and 
quickly gone when any effort is made to recover 
it, that, compared with the distinct and abiding 
presentments of sights and sounds, it is as nothing. 
Imagine, for example, that you had often seen 
Windsor Castle, and knew a great deal about it, its 
history, its noble appearance, which will look 
familiar to you when you see it again and affect 
you pleasantly as in the past; and that yet you 
could not see it with the mind’s eye, but that when, 
after a recent visit, you tried to see it mentally, 
