The Perfume of an Evening Primrose. 2409 
odours does not affect us at all: we can, in imagi- 
nation, uncork and sniff at cans of petroleum and 
saturate our pocket-handkerchiefs with assafcetida 
or carbolic acid, or walk behind a dust-cart, or wade 
through miles of fetid slime in some tropical morass, 
or take up some mephitic animal, like the skunk, and 
fondle it as we would a kitten, yet experience no 
pain, and no sensation of nausea. We can, if we 
like, call up all the sweet and abominable smells in 
nature, just as Owen Glendower called spirits from 
the vasty deep, but, like the spirits, they refuse to 
come ; or they come not as smells but as ideas, so 
that phosphuretted hydrogen causes no pain, and 
frangipani no pleasure. We only know that smells 
exist ; that we have roughly classified them as 
fragrant, aromatic, fresh, ethereal, stimulating, acrid, 
nauseous, and virulent; that each of these generic 
names includes a very large number of distinct 
odours : we know them all because the mind has 
taken note of the distinct character of each, and of 
its effect on us, not because it has registered a sensa- 
tion in our brain to be reproduced at will, as in the 
case of something we have seen or heard. 
It is true that we are equally powerless to recall 
tastes. Bain admits that “these sensations are 
deficient as regards the power of being remem- 
bered”’; but he did not discover the fact himself, 
nor does he verify it from his own experience, 
merely telling us that “longet observes.” But 
taste ig not an emotional sense. I know, for in- 
stance, that if I were to partake of some once 
