Edouard de Goncourt, in his novel Cherie—­the intimate history of a young girl, founded, he states, on much personal observation—­describes (Chapter LXXXV) the delight with which sensuous, but chaste young girls often take in strong perfumes.  “Perfume and love,” he remarks, “impart delights which are closely allied.”  In an earlier chapter (XLIV) he writes of his heroine at the age of 15:  “The intimately happy emotion which the young girl experienced in reading Paul et Virginie and other honestly amorous books she sought to make more complete and intense and penetrating by soaking the book with scent, and the love-story reached her senses and imagination through pages moist with liquid perfume.”

Carbini (Archivio per l’Antropologia, 1896, fasc. 3) in a very thorough investigation of a large number of children, found that the earliest osmo-gustative sensations occurred in the fourth week in girls, the fifth week in boys; the first real and definite olfactory sensations appeared in the fifteenth month in girls, in the sixteenth in boys; while experiments on several hundred children between the ages of 3 and 6 years showed the girls slightly, but distinctly, superior to the boys.  It may, of course, be argued that these results merely show a somewhat greater precocity of girls.  I have summarized the main investigations into this question in Man and Woman, revised and enlarged edition, 1904, pp. 134-138.  On the whole, they seem to indicate greater olfactory acuteness on the part of women, but the evidence is by no means altogether concordant in this sense.  Popular and general scientific opinion is also by no means always in harmony.  Thus, Tardif, in his book on odors in relation to the sexual instinct, throughout assumes, as a matter of course, that the sense of smell is most keen in men; while, on the other hand, I note that in a pamphlet by Mr. Martin Perls, a manufacturing perfumer, it is stated with equal confidence that “it is a well-known fact that ladies have, even without a practice of long standing, a keener sense of smell than men,” and on this account he employs a staff of young ladies for testing perfumes by smell in the laboratory by the glazed paper test.

It is sometimes said that the use of strong perfumes by women indicates a dulled olfactory organ.  On the other hand, it is said that the use of tobacco deadens the sensitiveness of the masculine nose.  Both these statements seem to be without foundation.  The use of a large amount of perfume is rather a question of taste than a question of sensory acuteness (not to mention that those who live in an atmosphere of perfume are, of course, only faintly conscious of it), and the chemist perfumer in his laboratory surrounded by strong odors can distinguish them all with great delicacy.  As regards tobacco, in Spain the cigarreras are women and girls who live perpetually in an atmosphere of tobacco, and Senora