Medical Journal, for May and June, 1898, will be found letters from several correspondents substantiating this point.  One of these correspondents (Dr. Tuckey, of Tywardwreath, Cornwall) mentions that he has in Cornwall often seen ravens flying over houses in which persons lay dying, evidently attracted by a characteristic odor.

It must be borne in mind, however, that, while every person has, to a sensitive nose, a distinguishing odor, we must regard that odor either as but one of the various sensations given off by the body, or else as a combination of two or more of these emanations.  The body in reality gives off a number of different odors.  The most important of these are:  (1) the general skin odor, a faint, but agreeable, fragrance often to be detected on the skin even immediately after washing; (2) the smell of the hair and scalp; (3) the odor of the breath; (4) the odor of the armpit; (5) the odor of the feet; (6) the perineal odor; (7) in men the odor of the preputial smegma; (8) in women the odor of the mons veneris, that of vulvar smegma, that of vaginal mucus, and the menstrual odor.  All these are odors which may usually be detected, though sometimes only in a very faint degree, in healthy and well-washed persons under normal conditions.  It is unnecessary here to take into account the special odors of various secretions and excretions.[35]

It is a significant fact, both as regards the ancestral sexual connections of the body odors and their actual sexual associations to-day, that, as Hippocrates long ago noted, it is not until puberty that they assume their adult characteristics.  The infant, the adult, the aged person, each has his own kind of smell, and, as Monin remarks, it might be possible, within certain limits, to discover the age of a person by his odor.  Jorg in 1832 pointed out that in girls the appearance of a specific smell of the excreta indicates the establishment of puberty, and Kaan, in his Psychopathia Sexualis, remarked that at puberty “the sweat gives out a more acrid odor resembling musk.”  In both sexes puberty, adolescence, early manhood and womanhood are marked by a gradual development of the adult odor of skin and excreta, in general harmony with the secondary sexual development of hair and pigment.  Venturi, indeed, has, not without reason, described the odor of the body as a secondary sexual character.[36] It may be added that, as is the case with the pigment in various parts of the body in women, some of these odors tend to become exaggerated in sympathy with sexual and other emotional states.

The odor of the infant is said to be of butyric acid; that of old people to resemble dry leaves.  Continent young men have been said by many ancient writers to smell more strongly than the unchaste, and some writers have described as “seminal odor”—­an odor resembling that of animals in heat, faintly recalling that of the he-goat, according to Venturi—­the