250 Idle Days mn Patagonia. 
familiar, long untasted dish, flavoured, let me say, 
with some such abomination (to the English palate) 
as cummin-seed or garlic ; some vegetable, or fruit, 
wild or cultivated, that I never see in England, it 
would not move me as I am moved by an odour, and 
would perhaps give me less pleasure than a dish of 
strawberries and cream. For in the flavour there 
is obvious contact with the organ of taste; it is 
gross aud inseparable from the thing eaten to supply 
a bodily want, and gives a momentary and purely 
animal gratification ; therefore to the mind it is not 
in the same category, but very much lower than 
that invisible, immaterial something that flies to us, 
not to give a sensuous pleasure only, but also to 
lead, to warn, to instruct, and call up before the 
mental eye bright images of things unseen. Con- 
sequently our inability to recall past flavours is not 
felt as a loss, and no effort is made to recover them; 
they are lost and were not worth keeping. 
This, then, to my mind, is the reason that smell 
is an emotional sense in so great a degree, compared 
with the other senses,—namely, because, like sight 
and hearing, it is an intellectual sense, and because, 
unlike sight and hearing, its sensations are for- 
gotten; and when after a long interval a forgotten 
odour, once familiar and associated intimately with 
the past, is again encountered, the sudden, unex- 
pected recovery of a lost sensation affects us in 
some such way as the accidental discovery of a store 
of gold, hidden away by ourselves in some past 
period of our life and forgotten; or as it would 
