Rousseau (in Emile, Bk.  II) regarded smell as the sense of the imagination.  So, also, at an earlier period, it was termed (according to Cloquet) by Cardano.  Cloquet frequently insisted on the qualities of odors which cause them to appeal to the imagination; on their irregular and inconstant character; on their power of intoxicating the mind on some occasions; on the curious individual and racial preferences in the matter of odors.  He remarked on the fact that the Persians employed asafoetida as a seasoning, while valerian was accounted a perfume in antiquity.  (Cloquet, Osphresiologie, pp. 28, 45, 71, 112.) It may be added, as a curious example familiar to most people of the dependence of the emotional tone of a smell on its associations, that, while the exhalations of other people’s bodies are ordinarily disagreeable to us, such is not the case with our own; this is expressed in the crude and vigorous dictum of the Elizabethan poet, Marston, “Every man’s dung smell sweet i’ his own nose.”  There are doubtless many implications, moral as well as psychological, in that statement.

The modern authorities on olfaction, Passy and Zwaardemaker, both alike insist on the same characteristics of the sense of smell:  its extreme acuity and yet its vagueness.  “We live in a world of odor,” Zwaardemaker remarks (L’Annee Psychologique, 1898, p. 203), “as we live in a world of light and of sound.  But smell yields us no distinct ideas grouped in regular order, still less that are fixed in the memory as a grammatical discipline.  Olfactory sensations awake vague and half-understood perceptions, which are accompanied by very strong emotion.  The emotion dominates us, but the sensation which was the cause of it remains unperceived.”  Even in the same individual there are wide variations in the sensitiveness to odors at different times, more especially as regards faint odors; Passy (L’Annee Psychologique, 1895, p. 387) brings forward some observations on this point.

Maudsley noted the peculiarly suggestive power of odors; “there are certain smells,” he remarked, “which never fail to bring back to me instantly and visibly scenes of my boyhood”; many of us could probably say the same.  Another writer (E.  Dillon, “A Neglected Sense,” Nineteenth Century, April, 1894) remarks that “no sense has a stronger power of suggestion.”

Ribot has made an interesting investigation as to the prevalence and nature of the emotional memory of odors (Psychology of the Emotions, Chapter XI).  By “emotional memory” is meant the spontaneous or voluntary revivability of the image, olfactory or other. (For the general question, see an article by F. Pillon, “La Memoire Affective, son Importance Theorique et Pratique,” Revue Philosophique, February, 1901; also Paulhan, “Sur la Memoire Affective,” Revue Philosophique, December, 1902 and January,