degree of tumescence must already have been attained.  It is even possible, when we bear in mind the intimate sympathy between the sexual sphere and the nose, that the olfactory organ needs to have its sensibility modified in a form receptive to sexual messages, though such an assumption is by no means necessary.  It is when such a faint preliminary degree of tumescence has been attained, however it may have been attained,—­for the methods of tumescence, as we know, are innumerable,—­that a sympathetic personal odor is enabled to make its appeal.  If we analyze the cases in which olfactory perceptions have proved potent in love, we shall nearly always find that they have been experienced under circumstances favorable for the occurrence of tumescence.  When this is not the case we may reasonably suspect the presence of some degree of perversion.

In the oft-quoted case of the Austrian peasant who found that he was aided in seducing young women by dancing with them and then wiping their faces with a handkerchief he had kept in his armpit, we may doubtless regard the preliminary excitement of the dance as an essential factor in the influence produced.

In the same way, I am acquainted with the ease of a lady not usually sensitive to simple body odors (though affected by perfumes and flowers) who on one occasion, when already in a state of sexual erethism, was highly excited when perceiving the odor of her lover’s axilla.

The same influence of preliminary excitement may be seen in another instance known to me, that of a gentlemen who when traveling abroad fell in with three charming young ladies during a long railway journey.  He was conscious of a pleasurable excitement caused by the prolonged intimacy of the journey, but this only became definitely sexual when the youngest of the ladies, stretching before him to look out of the window and holding on to the rack above, accidentally brought her axilla into close proximity with his face, whereupon erection was caused, although he himself regards personal odors, at all events when emanating from strangers, as indifferent or repulsive.

A medical correspondent, referring to the fact that with many men (indeed women also) sexual excitement occurs after dancing for a considerable time, remarks that he considers the odor of the woman’s sweat is here a considerable factor.

The characteristics of olfaction which our investigation has so far revealed have not, on the whole, been favorable to the influence of personal odors as a sexual attraction in civilized men.  It is a primitive sense which had its flowering time before men arose; it is a comparatively unaesthetic sense; it is a somewhat obtuse sense which among Europeans is usually incapable of perceiving the odor of the “human flower”—­to use Goethe’s phrase—­except on very close contact, and on this account, and on account of the fact that it is a predominantly emotional sense,