“I cannot understand how people do not see how the senses are connected,” said Jenny Lind to J.A.  Symonds (Horatio Brown, J.A.  Symonds, vol. i, p. 207).  “What I have suffered from my sense of smell!  My youth was misery from my acuteness of sensibility.”

Mantegazza discusses the strength of olfactory antipathies (Fisiologia dell’ Odio, p. 101), and mentions that once when ill in Paraguay he was nursed by an Indian girl of 16, who was fresh as a peach and extremely clean, but whose odor—­“a mixture of wild beast’s lair and decayed onions”—­caused nausea and almost made him faint.

Moll (Untersuchungen ueber die Libido Sexualis, bd. i, p. 135) records the case of a neuropathic man who was constantly rendered impotent by his antipathy to personal body odors.  It had very frequently happened to him to be attracted by the face and appearance of a girl, but at the last moment potency was inhibited by the perception of personal odor.

In the case of a man of distinguished ability known to me, belonging to a somewhat neuropathic family, there is extreme sensitiveness to the smell of a woman, which is frequently the most obvious thing to him about her.  He has seldom known a woman whose natural perfume entirely suits him, and his olfactory impressions have frequently been the immediate cause of a rupture of relationships.

It was formerly discussed whether strong personal odor constituted adequate ground for divorce.  Hagen, who brings forward references on this point (Sexuelle Osphresiologie, pp. 75-83), considers that the body odors are normally and naturally repulsive because they are closely associated with the capryl group of odors, which are those of many of the excretions.

Olfactory antipathies are, however, often strictly subordinated to the individual’s general emotional attitude toward the object from which they emanate.  This is illustrated in the case, known to me, of a man who on a hot day entering a steamboat with a woman to whom he was attached seated himself between her and a man, a stranger.  He soon became conscious of an axillary odor which he concluded to come from the man and which he felt as disagreeable.  But a little later he realized that it proceeded from his own companion, and with this discovery the odor at once lost its disagreeable character.

In this respect a personal odor resembles a personal touch.  Two intimate touches of the hand, though of precisely similar physical quality, may in their emotional effects be separated by an immeasurable interval, in dependence on our attitude toward the person from whom they proceed.

Personal odor, in order to make its allurement felt, and not to arouse antipathy, must, in normal persons, have been preceded by conditions which have inhibited the play of the antisexual instinct.  A certain