246 Idle Days tn Patagonia. 
nothing but a formless, dim, whitish patch ap- 
peared, only to disappear in an instant and come 
no more. Such a case would represent our con- 
dition with regard to even the strongest and most 
familiar smells. Yet in spite of our inability to 
recall them, we do distinctly make the effort; and 
in the case of some strong odour which we have 
recently inhaled the mind mocks us with this faint 
shadow of a phantasm; and this vain, or almost 
vain, effort of the mind, seems to show that odours in 
some past period of our history were so much more 
to us than they are now that they could be vividly 
reproduced, and that this power has been lost, or, 
at all events, is so weakened as to be of no use. 
I find that Bain, who makes different and con- 
tradictory statements on this subject in his work on 
the Senses and the Intellect, has the following 
sentence, with which I agree: ‘‘ By a great effort of 
the mind, we may approach very near to the re- 
covery of a smell that we have been extremely 
familiar with, as, for example, the odour of coffee, 
and if we were more dependent on ideas of smell, 
we might.succeed much better.” A very big i/, by 
the way; but it is probable that some savages, and 
some individuals among us that have a very acute 
sense of smell, do succeed much better. This sense 
being so much more to dogs than to man, it is not 
strange that they remember smells rather than 
sights, and can reproduce the sensation of smells, 
as their twitching and sniffing noses when they 
dream seem to show. 
