Of the Padmini, the perfect woman, the “lotus woman,” Hindu writers say that “her sweat has the odor of musk,” while the vulgar woman, they say, smells of fish (Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana).  Ploss and Bartels (Das Weib, 1901, p. 218) bring forward a passage from the Tamil Kokkogam, minutely describing various kinds of sexual odor in women, which they regard as resting on sound observation.

Four things in a woman, says the Arab, should be perfumed:  the mouth, the armpits, the pudenda, and the nose.  The Persian poets, in describing the body, delighted to use metaphors involving odor.  Not only the hair and the down on the face, but the chin, the mouth, the beauty spots, the neck, all suggested odorous images.  The epithets applied to the hair frequently refer to musk, ambergris, and civet. (Anis El-Ochchaq translated by Huart, Bibliotheque de l’Ecole des Hautes Etudes, fasc. 25, 1875.)

The Hebrew Song of Songs furnishes a typical example of a very beautiful Eastern love-poem in which the importance of the appeal to the sense of smell is throughout emphasized.  There are in this short poem as many as twenty-four fairly definite references to odors,—­personal odors, perfumes, and flowers,—­while numerous other references to flowers, etc., seem to point to olfactory associations.  Both the lover and his sweetheart express pleasure in each other’s personal odor.

        “My beloved is unto me,” she sings, “as a bag of myrrh
        That lieth between my breasts;
        My beloved is unto me as a cluster of henna flowers
        In the vineyard of En-gedi.”

    And again:  “His cheeks are as a bed of spices [or balsam], as
    banks of sweet herbs.”  While of her he says:  “The smell of thy
    breath [or nose] is like apples.”

Greek and Roman antiquity, which has so largely influenced the traditions of modern Europe, was lavish in the use of perfumes, but showed no sympathy with personal odors.  For the Roman satirists, like Martial, a personal odor is nearly always an unpleasant odor, though, there are a few allusions in classic literature recognizing bodily smell as a sexual attraction.  Ovid, in his Ars Amandi (Book III), says it is scarcely necessary to remind a lady that she must not keep a goat in her armpits:  “ne trux caper iret in alas.” “Mulier tum bene olet ubi nihil olet” is an ancient dictum, and in the sixteenth century Montaigne still repeated the same saying with complete approval.

A different current of feeling began to appear with the new emotional movement during the eighteenth century.  Rousseau called attention to the importance of the olfactory sense, and in his educational work, Emile (Bk.  II), he referred to the odor of a woman’s “cabinet de toilette” as not so feeble a snare as is commonly supposed.  In the same century