Daniel McKenzie

“ THE SENSE OF OLFACTION IN LOWER ANIMALS
Olfaction is generally felt to be the lowest, the most animal, of the senses, so much so that in polite society it is scarcely good manners to mention smells, and I am well aware of the risks I run in writing a book on the subject. And yet this feeling is by no means false modesty, because it is, first and foremost, to the animal in us that smell makes its appeal. None of the other senses brings so frankly to notice our kinship with the brute. ”

“ This West London efflorescence does not lie blooming alone. It is by no means the last rose of summer. On the east side of the great city, another, a rival upas-tree, spreads its nauseating blight, This is a mess that, oozing from a soap factory near Stratford-atte-Bow, envelops in its oleaginous cloud several hundred yards of the main line of the Great Eastern Railway. ”

“ But what it is that makes one dog smell to another of enmity or of friendship is as mysterious as—the mutual attraction or repulsion felt for each other by two human beings, shall we say ? For, of course, this suspense of judgment on encountering a new-comer is a human no less than a canine trait. ”

“ We have now come to the end of our discourse upon the theories of odour, and it must be confessed that we are still very much in the dark as to the nature of the odorous, and as to the manner in which it excites the olfactory organ to activity.
Still more mysterious, however, is the process by which the physical quality of odour becomes the sensation of the mind we call smell.
The transmutation of a physical quality into a sensation is indeed the great mystery of all our senses. ”

“ It is an historical fact that the movement which rendered England the pioneer country in the matter of Public Health received its first impulse from, and even now owes its continued existence to, the simple accident that the English public has grown intolerant of over-obtrusive odours. Stenches have attained to the dignity of a legal topic of interest, and are now by Act of Parliament become “nuisances” in law as well as in nature, with the result that they have been, for the most part, banished from the face of the land and the noses of its inhabitants. ”

“ It is remarkable that the liking for half-decomposed food, although an acquired taste, is found everywhere in the world, among savage and civilised, rich and poor, high and low—but not among young and old. For young people do not usually approve of such recherché flavours. It would be a mistake, however, to argue from that fact that these savoury meats act as fillips to a sense jaded with age, because it is generally agreed that neither smell nor taste declines in acuteness as we grow old. ”

“ This strange revival of bygone days by olfaction is, as I have said, automatic. It is most clearly and completely to be realised when the inciting odour comes upon us unawares, and then as in a dream the whole of the long-forgotten incident is displayed, even although it may have been an incident in which the odour itself was not specially obtrusive. Yet the display is not only a spectacle, for we become, as I have already laboured to point out, once more actors in the old life-drama. ”

“ The olfactory sense of insects has been credited with perhaps even more wonderful powers than those we have just been writing about. For instance, both Lubbock and Forel have shown that the extraordinary aptitude ants possess for finding their way back to their nest after their peregrinations in the mazy labyrinth of their world depends upon the sense of smell. On their return to the nest they follow the scent left by their own footsteps. ”

“ The odour of a big hæmorrhage is unmistakable and, to obstetricians particularly, ominous.
Then there is the smell of mice which attends upon the skin disease known as favus.
The breath of a chronic drunkard is familiar enough to everybody, and the more delicate aroma in the circumambient atmosphere of the careful tippler, ethereal and by no means unpleasant, will often reveal to the physician the hidden cause of obscure symptoms. It is particularly valuable when your patient is, as so many of these secret drinkers are, a woman, it may be a woman of good social standing. ”

“ Now, this act of judgment seems to us to be quite independent of any olfactory evidence. We rely upon our predominant senses just as the dog relies upon his. Yet I sometimes catch myself wondering whether olfaction, olfaction rarefied and refined beyond imagining, does not without our knowledge play some part in our estimate of the pros and cons in character.
What is conveyed to us by the “personality” of a man ? Here we have apparently a complex of sense-impressions, for the most part vague, which we are seldom able to analyse, even to ourselves. ”

“ It may be found on trial that by concentrating the attention strongly upon some familiar smell, particularly if at the same time we stimulate the memory by picturing in our mind’s eye a scene in which that odour figured as a feature in the sensory landscape, we are sometimes able to recall its actual sensation. But the recollection lacks the intimate reality of visual and auditory images. Without doubt the mind’s eye and mind’s ear, when consciously aroused, are consistently more acute and their representations are more vivid than those of the mind’s olfactory organ. ”

“ Whatever may be the reason, however, there is no doubt that the keen, clean chill of an English April day, especially when the wind is in the cast (pace Mr. Jarndyce) , brings to us an exaltation of spirit that surpasses the exhilaration of wine, and at the same time renders us impatient with mustiness and fustiness, intolerant of domestic stuffiness, and frankly disgusted with the pungent, prickly vapours of intimate humanity in the mass. The wind on the hilltop is our aspiration, our ideal. ”

“ In the same way, when a gun is fired close to the ear, we hear the sound before we are deafened by it.
It is for such reasons that perfumers never sniff at a bottle of scent ; they take a little, rub it on the back of the hand, and then wait until the spirit has evaporated before they proceed to smell it.
The exquisite delicacy of the sense might lead us to suppose that the olfactory organ must be quick at responding to its proper stimulus. ”

“ For example, every one is aware that a bunch of violets which is filling a room with its fragrance seems when held to the nose to have no smell at all, or at the most to have but a vague, indefinable sort of odour.
The effect, as a matter of fact, varies with the perfume employed. Some, like violets, have no smell at all. Others give a different smell when concentrated from what they give when dilute. Muskone, for one, the essential constituent of musk, has an odour of pines when concentrated ; and storax, a delightful perfume when dilute, is disagreeable when too powerful, and so on. ”

“ But the sum and substance of Havelock Ellis’s exhaustive inquiry on this point is undoubtedly this, that if a lover loves the aroma of his lady, that is because of his love, not because of her inherent sweetness. In other words, the attraction, subtle though it be, at least in the early or romantic stage, is seldom or never obviously olfactory. ”

“ One of the results of culture is an increase in the delicacy of the senses. When men and women strive after refinement, they achieve it, becoming refined, in spite of what pessimists and so-called realists preach, not only in their outward behaviour, but also in their innermost thoughts and feelings, and this internal refinement implies among other things a quickening of the sense of disgust. There is naturally a close and intimate connection between the sense of smell and the nerve-centres which, when stimulated, evoke the feeling of nausea in the mind—and the bodily acts that follow it. ”

“ Earth is a potent deodoriser. Do certain animals possess a sixth sense—a sympathy something akin to that of the divining rod ? If so, this goes farther to explain the much-discussed principle of scent than anything yet suggested.”
Is this sense, then, as we see it in operation in the badger, in the truffle-hunting dog, in the Bolboceros beetle, and still more wonderfully in the Peacock and Banded Monk moths, drawn to their mates “from the edge of the horizon,” and, it may be, against the wind—is this sense the same as our own sense of olfaction, only much more acute ? ”

“ When the physicist can control the vibrations of his electrons and make them rotate in accordance with his will, then he may be able to synthesise new odours—till then we have no means of testing his theories.”
The older view of olfaction—and many modern scientists, as we see, still adhere to it—is that the odorous molecule acts as a chemical reagent upon the olfactory hairs. And there is something to be said for this opinion.
To begin with, no one doubts nowadays that odours are material. They pass through the air as vapours, and they are known to travel miles on the wind. ”

“ In the macrosmatic terrestrial animals not only is the olfactory sense relatively highly organised, but it is absolutely the predominant sense. Vision is subsidiary to it. In their brains the olfactory region constitutes by far the largest component. (The same, by the way, is true of the Reptilia.)
In other words, it is upon the olfactory sense that these animals chiefly depend for their knowledge of the world. By it they are directed to their food, warned of their enemies, and attracted to their mates. Their universe is a universe of odour. ”

“ We may here remark that although we are usually able to perceive that the odour and the flavour of a sapid food or drink are akin to each other, the sensation of the odour anticipating that of the flavour, yet they are by no means always identical. ”

“ E. W. B. Childers starts from the page the moment his creator breathes into our nostrils a breath of his life :—“a smell of lamp oil, straw, orange-peel, horses’ provender, and sawdust.”
I could fill this book with olfactory citations from Dickens alone. But to come to contemporary writers, those of Rudyard Kipling are almost as plentiful, the smell that brings places to the mind being a favourite with him. ”

“ The taste-bulbs are capable of appreciating four sensations only, and these quite simple, while the capacity of the olfactory organ, as we shall see more fully later on, is practically unlimited. All the subtlety of “taste,” all that we call “flavour,” is an olfactory sensation. Thus, people devoid of the sense of smell cannot discern the finer savours. ”

“ The olfactory organ, under the continued stimulation of one particular odour, quite quickly becomes insensitive to it. Perhaps this is the reason, or one of the reasons, why reform was so long delayed.
There are, however, in this respect great differences between odours. With some the smell is lost in a few seconds, while with others we continue to be aware of it for a much longer time. Curiously enough, odours seem, in this matter, to follow the general law of the feelings in that the pleasant are lost sooner than the unpleasant. ”

“ For, in sooth, the present theme is one upon which we are justly entitled, in so far as England and Scotland at all events are concerned, to raise what would be a Nune Dimiitis of praise and thanksgiving, were it not that the price of cleanly air like that of liberty is eternal vigilance, seeing that our nostrils are no longer offended by the stenches our forefathers had to put up with. That they endured such offences philosophically, cheerfully even, laughing at the unpleasantness as men do at a bad smell, is true. ”

“ But smell is speechless. We can truthfully say that in our native English language there is not a single word characterising any one of all the myriad odours in the world.
No doubt there are many words that we do apply to smells. But they are either borrowed from the vocabulary of one of the other senses, in order to describe a state of mind induced by the smell, or else they originate from some known odoriferous object. ”