for smell ever to possess the same significance in sexual attraction in man that it possesses in the lower animals.  With that reservation there can be no doubt that odor has a certain favorable or unfavorable influence in sexual relationships in all human races from the lowest to the highest.  The Polynesian spoke with contempt of those women of European race who “have no smell,” and in view of the pronounced personal odor of so many savage peoples as well as of the careful attention which they so often pay to odors, we may certainly assume, even in the absence of much definite evidence, that smell counts for much in their sexual relationships.  This is confirmed by such practices as that found among some primitive peoples—­as, it is stated, in the Philippines—­of lovers exchanging their garments to have the smell of the loved one about them.  In the barbaric stages of society this element becomes self-conscious and is clearly avowed; personal odors are constantly described with complacency, sometimes as mingled with the lavish use of artificial perfumes, in much of the erotic literature produced in the highest stages of barbarism, especially by Eastern peoples living in hot climates; it is only necessary to refer to the Song of Songs, the Arabian Nights, and the Indian treatises on love.  Even in some parts of Europe the same influence is recognized in the crudest animal form, and Krauss states that among the Southern Slavs it is sometimes customary to leave the sexual parts unwashed because a strong odor of these parts is regarded as a sexual stimulant.  Under the usual conditions of life in Europe personal odor has sunk into the background; this has been so equally under the conditions of classic, mediaeval, and modern life.  Personal odor has been generally regarded as unaesthetic; it has, for the most part, only been mentioned to be reprobated, and even those poets and others who during recent centuries have shown a sensitive delight and interest in odors—­Herrick, Shelley, Baudelaire, Zola, and Huysmans—­have seldom ventured to insist that a purely natural and personal odor can be agreeable.  The fact that it may be so, and that for most people such odors cannot be a matter of indifference in the most intimate of all relationships, is usually only to be learned casually and incidentally.  There can be no doubt, however, that, as Kiernan points out, the extent to which olfaction influences the sexual sphere in civilized man has been much underestimated.  We need not, therefore, be surprised at the greater interest which has recently been taken in this subject.  As usually happens, indeed, there has been in some writers a tendency to run to the opposite extreme, and we cannot, with Gustav Jaeger, regard the sexual instinct as mainly or altogether an olfactory matter.