This poet seems, however, to have been carried to a pitch of enthusiasm unusual even in China, for his future mother-in-law, after expressing her admiration for the poem, remarks:  “But who would have thought one could find so many beautiful things under my daughter’s armpit!”

The odor of the armpit is the most powerful in the body, sufficiently powerful to act as a muscular stimulant even in the absence of any direct sexual association.  This is indicated by an observation made by Fere, who noticed, when living opposite a laundry, that an old woman who worked near the window would, toward the close of the day, introduce her right hand under the sleeve of the other to the armpit and then hold it to her nose; this she would do about every five minutes.  It was evident that the odor acted as a stimulant to her failing energies.  Fere has been informed by others who have had occasion to frequent workrooms that this proceeding is by no means uncommon among persons of both sexes. (Fere, L’Instinct Sexuel, second edition, p. 135.) I have myself noticed the same gesture very deliberately made in the street by a young English woman of the working class, under circumstances which suggested that it acted as an immediate stimulant in fatigue.

Huysmans—­who in his novels has insisted on odors, both those of a personal kind and perfumes, with great precision—­has devoted one of the sketches, “Le Gousset,” in his Croquis Parisiens (1880) to the varying odors of women’s armpits.  “I have followed this fragrance in the country,” he remarks, “behind a group of women gleaners under the bright sun.  It was excessive and terrible; it stung your nostrils like an unstoppered bottle of alkali; it seized you, irritating your mucous membrane with a rough odor which had in it something of the relish of wild duck cooked with olives and the sharp odor of the shallot.  On the whole, it was not a vile or repugnant emanation; it united, as an anticipated thing, with the formidable odors of the landscape; it was the pure note, completing with the human animals’ cry of heat the odorous melody of beasts and woods.”  He goes on to speak of the perfume of feminine arms in the ball-room.  “There the aroma is of ammoniated valerian, of chlorinated urine, brutally accentuated sometimes, even with a slight scent of prussic acid about it, a faint whiff of overripe peaches.”  These “spice-boxes,” however, Huysmans continues, are more seductive when their perfume is filtered through the garments.  “The appeal of the balsam of their arms is then less insolent, less cynical, than at the ball where they are more naked, but it more easily uncages the animal in man.  Various as the color of the hair, the odor of the armpit is infinitely divisible; its gamut covers the whole keyboard of odors, reaching the obstinate scents of syringa and elder, and sometimes recalling the sweet perfume of the rubbed fingers that have held a cigarette.