In a book written during the first half of the nineteenth century which contains various subtle observations on love we read, with reference to the sweet odor which poets have found in the breath of women: "In reality many women have an intoxicatingly agreeable breath which plays no small part in the love-compelling atmosphere which they spread around them" (Eros oder Woerterbuch ueber die Physiologie, 1849, Bd. 1, p. 45).

Most of the writers on the psychology of love at this period, however, seem to have passed over the olfactory element in sexual attraction, regarding it probably as too unaesthetic. It receives no emphasis either in Senancour's De l'Amour or Stendhal's De l'Amour or Michelet's L'Amour.

The poets within recent times have frequently referred to odors, personal and other, but the novelists have more rarely done so. Zola and Huysmans, the two novelists who have most elaborately and insistently developed the olfactory side of life, have dwelt more on odors that are repulsive than on those that are agreeable. It is therefore of interest to note that in a few remarkable novels of recent times the attractiveness of personal odor has been emphasized. This is notably so in Tolstoy's War and Peace, in which Count Peter suddenly resolves to marry Princess Helena after inhaling her odor at a ball. In d'Annunzio's Trionfo della Morte the seductive and consoling odor of the beloved woman's skin is described in several passages; thus, when Giorgio kissed Ippolita's arms and shoulders, we are told, "he perceived the sharp and yet delicate perfume of her, the perfume of the skin that in the hour of joy became intoxicating as that of the tuberose, and a terrible lash to desire."

When we are dealing with the sexual significance of personal odors in man there is at the outset an important difference to be noticed in comparison with the lower mammals. Not only is the significance of odor altogether very much less, but the focus of olfactory attractiveness has been displaced. The centre of olfactory attractiveness is not, as usually among animals, in the sexual region, but is transferred to the upper part of the body. In this respect the sexual olfactory allurement in man resembles what we find in the sphere of vision, for neither the sexual organs of man nor of woman are usually beautiful in the eyes of the opposite sex, and their exhibition is not among us regarded as a necessary stage in courtship. The odor of the body, like its beauty, in so far as it can be regarded as a possible sexual allurement, has in the course of development been transferred to the upper parts. The careful concealment of the sexual region has doubtless favored this transfer. It has thus happened that when personal odor acts as a sexual allurement it is the armpit, in any case normally the chief focus of odor in the body, which mainly comes into play, together with the skin and the hair.

Aubert, of Lyons, noted that during menstruation the odor of the armpits may become more powerful, and describes it as being at this time an aromatic odor of acidulous or chloroform character. Galopin remarks that, while some women's armpits smell of sheep in rut, others, when exposed to the air, have a fragrance of ambergris or violet. Dark persons (according to Gould and Pyle) are said sometimes to exhale a prussic acid odor, and blondes more frequently musk; Galopin associates the ambergris odor more especially with blondes.

While some European poets have faintly indicated the woman's armpit as a centre of sexual attraction, it is among Eastern poets that we may find the idea more directly and naturally expressed. Thus, in a Chinese drama ("The Transmigration of Yo-Chow," Mercure de France, No. 8, 1901) we find a learned young doctor addressing the following poem to his betrothed:—

"When I have climbed to the bushy summit of Mount Chao, I have still not reached to the level of your odorous armpit. I must needs mount to the sky Before the breeze brings to me The perfume of that embalsamed nest!"

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. Audacious and sometimes fatiguing in the brunette and the black woman, sharp and fierce in the red woman, the armpit is heady as some sugared wines in the blondes." It will be noted that this very exact description corresponds at various points with the remarks of more scientific observers.

Sometimes the odor of the armpit may even become a kind of fetich which is craved for its own sake and in itself suffices to give pleasure. Fere has recorded such a case, in a friend of his own, a man of 60, with whom at one time he used to hunt, of robust health and belonging to a healthy family. On these hunting expeditions he used to tease the girls and women he met (sometimes even rather old women) in a surprising manner, when he came upon them walking in the fields with their short-sleeved chemises exposed. When he had succeeded in introducing his hand into the woman's armpit he went away satisfied, and frequently held the hand to his nose with evident pleasure. After long hesitation Fere asked for an explanation, which was frankly given. As a child he had liked the odor, without knowing why. As a young man women with strong odors had stimulated him to extraordinary sexual exploits, and now they were the only women who had any influence on him. He professed to be able to recognize continence by the odor, as well as the most favorable moment for approaching a woman. Throughout life a cold in the head had always been accompanied by persistent general excitement. (Fere, L'Instinct Sexuel, 1902, p. 134.)

We not only have to recognize that in the course of evolution the specific odors of the sexual region have sunk into the background as a source of sexual allurements, we have further to recognize the significant fact that even those personal odors which are chiefly liable under normal circumstances to come occasionally within the conscious sexual sphere, and indeed purely personal odors of all kinds, fail to exert any attraction, but rather tend to cause antipathy, unless some degree of tumescence has already been attained. That is to say, our olfactory experiences of the human body approximate rather to our tactile experiences of it than to our visual experiences. Sight is our most intellectual sense, and we trust ourselves to it with comparative boldness without any undue dread that its messages will hurt us by their personal intimacy; we even court its experiences, for it is the chief organ of our curiosity, as smell is of a dog's. But smell with us has ceased to be a leading channel of intellectual curiosity. Personal odors do not, as vision does, give us information that is very largely intellectual; they make an appeal that is mainly of an intimate, emotional, imaginative character. They thus tend, when we are in our normal condition, to arouse what James calls the antisexual instinct.

"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 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, personal odors in ordinary social intercourse are less likely to arouse the sexual instinct than the antisexual instinct. If a certain degree of tumescence is required before a personal odor can exert an attractive influence, a powerful personal odor, strong enough to be perceived before any degree of tumescence is attained, will tend to cause repulsion, and in so doing tend, consciously or unconsciously, to excite prejudice against personal odor altogether. This is actually the case in civilization, and most people, it would appear, view with more or less antipathy the personal odors of those persons to whom they are not sexually attracted, while their attitude is neutral in this respect toward the individuals to whom they are sexually attracted.[51] The following statement by a correspondent seems to me to express the experience of the majority of men in this respect: "I do not notice that different people have different smells. Certain women I have known have been in the habit of using particular scents, but no associations could be aroused if I were to smell the same scent now, for I should not identify it. As a boy I was very fond of scent, and I associate this with my marked sexual proclivities. I like a woman to use a little scent. It rouses my sexual feelings, but not to any large extent. I dislike the smell of a woman's vagina." While the last statement seems to express the feeling of many if not most men, it may be proper to add that there seems no natural reason why the vulvar odor of a clean and healthy woman should be other than agreeable to a normal man who is her lover.

In literature it is the natural odor of women rather than men which receives attention. We should expect this to be the case since literature is chiefly produced by men. The question as to whether men or women are really more apt to be sexually influenced in this way cannot thus be decided. Among animals, it seems probable, both sexes are alike influenced by odors, for, while it is usually the male whose sexual regions are furnished with special scent glands, when such occur, the peculiar odor of the female during the sexual season is certainly not less efficacious as an allurement to the male. If we compare the general susceptibility of men and women to agreeable odors, apart from the question of sexual allurement, there can be little doubt that it is most marked among women. As Groos points out, even among children little girls are more interested in scents than boys, and the investigations of various workers, especially Garbini, have shown that there is actually a greater power of discriminating odors among girls than among boys. Marro has gone further, and in an extended series of observations on girls before and after the establishment of puberty—which is of considerable interest from the point of view of the sexual significance of olfaction—he has shown reason to believe that girls acquire an increased susceptibility to odors when sexual life begins, although they show no such increased powers as regards the other senses.[52] On the whole, it would appear that, while women are not apt to be seriously affected, in the absence of any preliminary excitation, by crude body odors, they are by no means insusceptible to the sexual influence of olfactory impressions. It is probable, indeed, that they are more affected, and more frequently affected, in this way, than are men.

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 Pardo Bazan, who knows them well, remarks in her novel, La Tribuna, which deals with life in a tobacco factory, that "the acuity of the sense of smell of the cigarreras is notable, and it would seem that instead of blunting the nasal membrane the tobacco makes the olfactory nerves keener."

"It was the same as if I was in a sweet apple garden, from the sweetness that came to me when the light wind passed over them and stirred their clothes," a woman is represented as saying concerning a troop of handsome men in the Irish sagas (Cuchulain of Muirthemne, p. 161). The pleasure and excitement experienced by a woman in the odor of her lover is usually felt concerning a vague and mixed odor which may be characteristic, but is not definitely traceable to any specific bodily sexual odor. The general odor of the man she loves, one woman states, is highly, sometimes even overwhelmingly, attractive to her; but the specific odor of the male sexual organs which she describes as fishy has no attraction. A man writes that in his relations with women he has never been able to detect that they were influenced by the axillary or other specific odors. A woman writes: "To me any personal odor, as that of perspiration, is very disagreeable, and the healthy naked human body is very free from any odor. Fresh perspiration has no disagreeable smell; it is only by retention in the clothing that it becomes objectionable. The faint smell of smoke which lingers round men who smoke much is rather exciting to me, but only when it is very faint. If at all strong it becomes disagreeable. As most of the men who have attracted me have been great smokers, there is doubtless a direct association of ideas. It has only once occurred to me that an indifferent unpleasant smell became attractive in connection with some particular person. In this case it was the scent of stale tobacco, such as comes from the end of a cold cigar or cigarette. It was, and is now, very disagreeable to me, but, for the time and in connection with a particular person, it seemed to me more delightful and exciting than the most delicious perfume. I think, however, only a very strong attraction could overcome a dislike of this sort, and I doubt if I could experience such a twist-round if it had been a personal odor. Stale tobacco, though nasty, conveys no mentally disagreeable idea. I mean it does not suggest dirt or unhealthiness."

It is probably significant of the somewhat considerable part which, in one way or another, odors and perfumes play in the emotional life of women, that, of the 4 women whose sexual histories are recorded in Appendix B of vol. iii of these Studies, all are liable to experience sexual effects from olfactory stimuli, 3 of them from personal odors (though this fact is not in every case brought out in the histories as recorded), while of the 8 men not one has considered his olfactory experiences in this respect as worthy of mention.

The very marked sexual fascination which odor, associated with the men they love, exerts on women has easily passed unperceived, since women have not felt called upon to proclaim it. In sexual inversion, however, when the woman takes a more active and outspoken part than in normal love, it may very clearly be traced. Here, indeed, it is often exaggerated, in consequence of the common tendency for neurotic and neurasthenic persons to be more than normally susceptible to the influence of odors. In the majority of inverted women, it may safely be said, the odor of the beloved person plays a very considerable part. Thus, one inverted woman asks the woman she loves to send her some of her hair that she may intoxicate herself in solitude with its perfume (Archivio di Psicopatie Sessuali, vol. i, fasc. 3, p. 36). Again, a young girl with some homosexual tendencies, was apt to experience sexual emotions when in ordinary contact with schoolfellows whose body odor was marked (Fere, L'Instinct Sexuel, p. 260). Such examples are fairly typical.

That the body odor of men may in a large number of cases be highly agreeable and sexually attractive is shown by the testimony of male sexual inverts. There is abundant evidence to this effect. Raffalovich (L'Uranisme et l'Unisexualite, p. 126) insists on the importance of body odors as a sexual attraction to the male invert, and is inclined to think that the increased odor of the man's own body during sexual excitement may have an auto-aphrodisiacal effect which is reflected on the body of the loved person. The odor of peasants, of men who work in the open air, is specially apt to be found attractive. Moll mentions the case of an inverted man who found the "forest, mosslike odor" of a schoolfellow irresistibly attractive.

The following passage from a letter written by an Italian marquis has been sent to me: "Bonifazio stripped one evening, to give me pleasure. He has the full, rounded flesh and amber coloring which painters of the Giorgione school gave to their S. Sebastians. When he began to dress, I took up an old fascia, or girdle of netted silk, which was lying under his breeches, and which still preserved the warmth of his body. I buried my face in it, and was half inebriated by its exquisite aroma of young manhood and fresh hay. He told me he had worn it for two years. No wonder it was redolent of him. I asked him to let me keep it as a souvenir. He smiled and said: 'You like it because it has lain so long upon my panoia.' 'Yes, just so,' I replied; 'whenever I kiss it, thus and thus, it will bring you back to me.' Sometimes I tie it round my naked waist before I go to bed. The smell of it is enough to cause a powerful erection, and the contact of its fringes with my testicles and phallus has once or twice produced an involuntary emission."

I may here reproduce a communication which has reached me concerning the attractiveness of the odor of peasants: "One predominant attraction of these men is that they are pure and clean; their bodies in a state of healthy normal function. Then they possess, if they are temperate, what the Greek poet Straton called the phydike chrotos (a quality which, according to this authority, is never found in women). This 'natural fair perfume of the flesh' is a peculiar attribute of young men who live in the open air and deal with natural objects. Even their perspiration has an odor very different from that of girls in ball-rooms: more refined, ethereal, pervasive, delicate, and difficult to seize. When they have handled hay—in the time of hay-harvest, or in winter, when they bring hay down from mountain huts—the youthful peasants carry about with them the smell of 'a field the Lord hath blessed.' Their bodies and their clothes exhale an indefinable fragrance of purity and sex combined. Every gland of the robust frame seems to have accumulated scent from herbs and grasses, which slowly exudes from the cool, fresh skin of the lad. You do not perceive it in a room. You must take the young man's hands and bury your face in them, or be covered with him under the same blanket in one bed, to feel this aroma. No sensual impression on the nerves of smell is more poignantly impregnated with spiritual poetry—the poetry of adolescence, and early hours upon the hills, and labor cheerfully accomplished, and the harvest of God's gifts to man brought home by human industry. It is worth mentioning that Aristophanes, in his description of the perfect Athenian Ephebus, dwells upon his being redolent of natural perfumes."

In a passage in the second part of Faust Goethe (who appears to have felt considerable interest in the psychology of smell) makes three women speak concerning the ambrosiacal odor of young men.

In this connection, also, I note a passage in a poem ("Appleton House") by our own English poet Marvell, which it is of interest to quote:—

"And now the careless victors play, Dancing the triumphs of the hay, When every mower's wholesome heat Smells like an Alexander's sweat. Their females fragrant as the mead Which they in fairy circles tread, When at their dance's end they kiss, Their new-mown hay not sweeter is."

FOOTNOTES:

[30] R. Andree, "Voelkergeruch," in Ethnographische Parallelen, Neue Folge, 1889, pp. 213-222, brings together many passages describing the odors of various peoples. Hagen, Sexuelle Osphresiologie, pp. 166 et seq., has a chapter on the subject; Joest, supplement to International Archiv fuer Ethnographie, 1893, p. 53, has an interesting passage on the smells of various races, as also Waitz, Introduction to Anthropology, p. 103. Cf. Sir H.H. Johnston, British Central Africa, p. 395; T.H. Parke, Experiences in Equatorial Africa, p. 409; E.H. Man, Journal of the Anthropological Institute, 1889, p. 391; Brough Smyth, Aborigines of Victoria, vol. i, p. 7; d'Orbigny, L'Homme Americain, vol. i, p. 87, etc.

[31] B. Adachi "Geruch der Europaer," Globus, 1903, No. 1.

[32] Hagen quotes testimonies on this point, Sexuelle Osphresiologie, p. 173. The negro, Castellani states, considers that Europeans have a smell of death.

[33] Reports of the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition, vol. ii, p. 181.

[34] Waitz, Introduction to Anthropology, p. 103.

[35] Monin, Les Odeurs du Corps Humain, second edition, Paris, 1886, discusses briefly but comprehensively the normal and more especially the pathological odors of the body and of its secretions and excretions.

[36] Venturi, Degenerazione Psicho-sessuale, p. 417.

[37] Quoted by Fere, L'Instinct Sexuel, 1902, p. 133.

[38] H. Ling Roth, "On Salutations," Journal of the Anthropological Institute, November, 1889.

[39] See Appendix A: "The Origins of the Kiss."

[40] See, e.g., passage quoted by I. Bloch, Beitraege zur AEtiologie der Psychopathia Sexualis, Teil II, p. 205.

[41] It must at the same time be remembered that the more or less degree of exposure involved by sexual intercourse is itself a cause of nasal congestion and sneezing.

[42] Fere, Pathologie des Emotions, p. 81

[43] J.N. Mackenzie similarly suggests (Johns Hopkins Hospital Bulletin, No. 82, 1898) that "irritation and congestion of the nasal mucous membrane precede, or are the excitants of, the olfactory impression that forms the connecting link between the sense of smell and erethism of the reproductive organs exhibited in the lower animals."

[44] Les Odeurs dans les Romans de Zola, Montpellier, 1889.

[45] Toulouse, Emile Zola, pp. 163-165, 173-175.

[46] P.J. Moebius, Das Pathologische bei Nietzsche.

[47] Moll has a passage on the sense of smell in the blind, more especially in sexual respects, Untersuchungen ueber die Libido Sexualis, bd. 1, pp. 137 et seq.

[48] See, for instance, his poem, "Love Perfumes all Parts," in which he declares that "Hands and thighs and legs are all richly aromatical." And compare the lyrics entitled "A Song to the Maskers," "On Julia's Breath," "Upon Julia's Unlacing Herself," "Upon Julia's Sweat," and "To Mistress Anne Soame."

[49] There are various indications that Goethe was attentive to the attraction of personal odors; and that he experienced this attraction himself is shown by the fact that, as he confessed, when he once had to leave Weimar on an official journey for two days he took a bodice of Frau von Stein's away in order to carry the scent of her body with him.

[50] Hagen has brought together from the literature of the subject a number of typical cases of olfactory fetichism, Sexuelle Osphresiologie, 1901, pp. 82 et seq.

[51] Moll's inquiries among normal persons have also shown that few people are conscious of odor as a sexual attraction. (Untersuchungen ueber die Libido Sexualis. Bd. I, p. 133.)

[52] Marro, La, Puberta, 1898, Chapter II. Tardif found in boys that perfumes exerted little or no influence on circulation and respiration before puberty, though his observations on this point were too few to carry weight.



IV.

The Influence of Perfumes—Their Aboriginal Relationship to Sexual Body Odors—This True even of the Fragrance of Flowers—The Synthetic Manufacture of Perfumes—The Sexual Effects of Perfumes—Perfumes perhaps Originally Used to Heighten the Body Odors—The Special Significance of the Musk Odor—Its Wide Natural Diffusion in Plants and Animals and Man—Musk a Powerful Stimulant—Its Widespread Use as a Perfume—Peau d'Espagne—The Smell of Leather and its Occasional Sexual Effects—The Sexual Influence of the Odors of Flowers—The Identity of many Plant Odors with Certain Normal and Abnormal Body Odors—The Smell of Semen in this Connection.

So far we have been mainly concerned with purely personal odors. It is, however, no longer possible to confine the discussion of the sexual significance of odor within the purely animal limit. The various characteristics of personal odor which have been noted—alike those which tend to make it repulsive and those which tend to make it attractive—have led to the use of artificial perfumes, to heighten the natural odor when it is regarded as attractive, to disguise it when it is regarded as repellent; while at the same time, happily covering both of these impulses, has developed the pure delight in perfume for its own agreeableness, the aesthetic side of olfaction. In this way—although in a much less constant and less elaborate manner—the body became adorned to the sense of smell just as by clothing and ornament it is adorned to the sense of sight.

But—and this is a point of great significance from our present standpoint—we do not really leave the sexual sphere by introducing artificial perfumes. The perfumes which we extract from natural products, or, as is now frequently the case, produce by chemical synthesis, are themselves either actually animal sexual odors or allied in character or composition, to the personal odors they are used to heighten or disguise. Musk is the product of glands of the male Moschus moschiferus which correspond to preputial sebaceous glands; castoreum is the product of similar sexual glands in the beaver, and civet likewise from the civet; ambergris is an intestinal calculus found in the rectum of the cachelot.[53] Not only, however, are nearly all the perfumes of animal origin, in use by civilized man, odors which have a specially sexual object among the animals from which they are derived, but even the perfumes of flowers may be said to be of sexual character. They are given out at the reproductive period in the lives of plants, and they clearly have very largely as their object an appeal to the insects who secure plant fertilization, such appeal having as its basis the fact that among insects themselves olfactory sensibility has in many cases been developed in their own mating.[54] There is, for example, a moth in which both sexes are similarly and inconspicuously marked, but the males diffuse an agreeable odor, said to be like pineapple, which attracts the females.[55] If, therefore, the odors of flowers have developed because they proved useful to the plant by attracting insects or other living creatures, it is obvious that the advantage would lie with those plants which could put forth an animal sexual odor of agreeable character, since such an odor would prove fascinating to animal creatures. We here have a very simple explanation of the fundamental identity of odors in the animal and vegetable worlds. It thus comes about that from a psychological point of view we are not really entering a new field when we begin to discuss the influence of perfumes other than those of the animal body. We are merely concerned with somewhat more complex or somewhat more refined sexual odors; they are not specifically different from the human odors and they mingle with them harmoniously. Popular language bears witness to the truth of this statement, and the normal and abnormal human odors, as we have already seen, are constantly compared to artificial, animal, and plant odors, to chloroform, to musk, to violet, to mention only those similitudes which seem to occur most frequently.

The methods now employed for obtaining the perfumes universally used in civilized lands are three: (1) the extraction of odoriferous compounds from the neutral products in which they occur; (2) the artificial preparation of naturally occurring odoriferous compounds by synthetic processes; (3) the manufacture of materials which yield odors resembling those of pleasant smelling natural objects. (See, e.g., "Natural and Artificial Perfumes," Nature, December 27, 1900.) The essential principles of most of our perfumes belong to the complex class of organic compounds known as terpenes. During recent years a number of the essential elements of natural perfumes have been studied, in many cases the methods of preparing them artificially discovered, and they are largely replacing the use of natural perfumes not only for soaps, etc., but for scent essences, though it appears to be very difficult to imitate exactly the delicate fragrance achieved by Nature. Artificial musk was discovered accidentally by Bauer when studying the butyltoluenes contained in a resin extractive. Vanillin, the odoriferous principle of the vanilla bean, is an aldehyde which was first artificially prepared by Tiemann and Haarmann in 1874 by oxidizing coniferin, a glucoside contained in the sap of various coniferae, but it now appears to be usually manufactured from eugenol, a phenol contained in oil of cloves. Piperonal, an aldehyde closely allied to vanillin, is used in perfumery under the name of heliotropin and is prepared from oil of sassafras and oil of camphor. Cumarine, the material to which tonka bean, sweet woodruff, and new-mown hay owe their characteristic odors, was synthetically prepared by W.H. Parkin in 1868 by heating sodiosalicylic aldehyde with acetic anhydride, though now more cheaply prepared from an herb growing in Florida. Irone, which has the perfume of violets, was isolated in 1893 from a ketone contained in orris-root; and ionone, another ketone which has a very closely similar odor of fresh violets and was isolated after some years' further work, is largely used in the preparation of violet perfume. Irone and ionone are closely similar in composition to oil of turpentine which when taken into the body is partly converted into perfume and gives a strong odor of violets to the urine. "Little has yet been accomplished toward ascertaining the relation between the odor and the chemical constitution of substances in general. Hydrocarbons as a class possess considerable similarity in odor, so also do the organic sulphides and, to a much smaller extent, the ketones. The subject waits for some one to correlate its various physiological, psychological and physical aspects in the same way that Helmholtz did for sound. It seems, as yet, impossible to assign any probable reason to the fact that many substances have a pleasant odor. It may, however, be worth suggesting that certain compounds, such as the volatile sulphides and the indoles, have very unpleasant odors because they are normal constituents of mammalian excreta and of putrefied animal products; the repulsive odors may be simply necessary results of evolutionary processes." (Loc. cit., Nature, December 27, 1900.)

Many of the perfumes in use are really combinations of a great many different odors in varying proportions, such as oil of rose, lavender oil, ylang-ylang, etc. The most highly appreciated perfumes are often made up of elements which in stronger proportion would be regarded as highly unpleasant.

In the study and manufacture of perfumes Germany and France have taken the lead in recent times. The industry is one of great importance. In France alone the trade in perfumes amounts to L4,000,000.

It is doubtless largely owing to the essential and fundamental identity of odors—to the chemical resemblances even of odors from the most widely remote sources—that we find that perfumes in many cases have the same sexual effects as are primitively possessed by the body odors. In northern countries, where the use of perfumes is chiefly cultivated by women, it is by women that this sexual influence is most liable to be felt. In the South and in the East it appears to be at least equally often experienced by men. Thus, in Italy Mantegazza remarks that "many men of strong sexual temperament cannot visit with impunity a laboratory of essences and perfumes."[56] In the East we find it stated in the Islamic book entitled The Perfumed Garden of Sheik Nefzaoui that the use of perfumes by women, as well as by men, excites to the generative act. It is largely in reliance on this fact that in many parts of the world, especially among Eastern peoples and occasionally among ourselves in Europe, women have been accustomed to perfume the body and especially the vulva.[57]

It seems highly probable that, as has been especially emphasized by Hagen, perfumes were primitively used by women, not as is sometimes the case in civilization, with the idea of disguising any possible natural odor, but with the object of heightening and fortifying the natural odor.[58] If the primitive man was inclined to disparage a woman whose odor was slight or imperceptible,—turning away from her with contempt, as the Polynesian turned away from the ladies of Sydney: "They have no smell!"—women would inevitably seek to supplement any natural defects in this respect, and to accentuate their odorous qualities, in the same way as by corsets and bustles, even in civilization, they have sought to accentuate the sexual saliencies of their bodies. In this way we may, as Hagen suggests, explain the fact that until recent times the odors preferred by women have not been the most delicate or exquisite, but the strongest, the most animal, the most sexual: musk, castoreum, civet, and ambergris.

In that interesting novel—dealing with the adventures of a Jewish maiden at the Persian court of Xerxes—which under the title of Esther has found its way into the Old Testament we are told that it was customary in the royal harem at Shushan to submit the women to a very prolonged course of perfuming before they were admitted to the king: "six months with oil of myrrh and six months with sweet odors." (Esther, Chapter II, v. 12.)

In the Arabian Nights there are many allusions to the use of perfumes by women with a more or less definitely stated aphrodisiacal intent. Thus we read in the story of Kamaralzaman: "With fine incense I will perfume my breasts, my belly, my whole body, so that my skin may melt more sweetly in thy mouth, O apple of my eye!"

Even among savages the perfuming of the body is sometimes practiced with the object of inducing love in the partner. Schellong states that the Papuans of Kaiser Wilhelm's Land rub various fragrant plants into their bodies for this purpose. (Zeitschrift fuer Ethnologie, 1899, ht. i, p. 19.) The significance of this practice is more fully revealed by Haddon when studying the Papuans of Torres Straits among whom the initiative in courtship is taken by the women. It was by scenting himself with a pungent odorous substance that a young man indicated that he was ready to be sued by the girls. A man would wear this scent at the back of his neck during a dance in order to attract the attention of a particular girl; it was believed to act with magical certainty, after the manner of a charm (Reports of the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to Torres Straits, vol. v, pp. 211, 222, and 328).

The perfume which is of all perfumes the most interesting from the present point of view is certainly musk. With ambergris, musk is the chief member of Linnaeus's group of Odores ambrosiacae, a group which in sexual significances, as Zwaardemaker remarks, ranks besides the capryl group of odors. It is a perfume of ancient origin; its name is Persian[59] (indicating doubtless the channel whence it reached Europe) and ultimately derived from the Sanskrit word for testicle in allusion to the fact that it was contained in a pouch removed from the sexual parts of the male musk-deer. Musk odors, however, often of considerable strength, are very widely distributed in Nature, alike among animals and plants. This is indicated by the frequency with which the word "musk" forms part of the names of animals and plants which are by no means always nearly related. We have the musk-ox, the musky mole, several species called musk-rat, the musk-duct, the musk-beetle; while among plants which have received their names from a real or supposed musky odor are, besides several that are called musk-plant, the musk-rose, the musk-hyacinth, the musk-mallow, the musk-orchid, the musk-melon, the musk-cherry, the musk-pear, the musk-plum, muskat and muscatels, musk-seed, musk-tree, musk-wood, etc.[60] But a musky odor is not merely widespread in Nature among plants and the lower animals, it is peculiarly associated with man. Incidentally we have already seen how it is regarded as characteristic of some races of man, especially the Chinese. Moreover, the smell of the negress is said to be musky in character, and among Europeans a musky odor is said to be characteristic of blondes. Laycock, in his Nervous Diseases of Women, stated his opinion that "the musk odor is certainly the sexual odor of man"; and Fere states that the musk odor is that among natural perfumes most nearly approaching the odor of the sexual secretions. We have seen that the Chinese poet vaunts the musky odor of his mistress's armpits, while another Oriental saying concerning the attractive woman is that "her navel is filled with musk." Persian literature contains many references to musk as an attractive body odor, and Firdusi speaks of a woman's hair as "a crown of musk," while the Arabian poet Motannabi says of his mistress that "her hyacinthine hair smells sweeter than Scythian musk." Galopin stated that he knew women whose natural odor of musk (and less frequently of ambergris) was sufficiently strong to impart to a bath in less than an hour a perfume due entirely to the exhalations of the musky body; it must be added that Galopin was an enthusiast in this matter.

The special significance of musk from our present point of view lies not only in the fact that we here have a perfume, widely scattered throughout nature and often in an agreeable form, which is at the same time a very frequent personal odor in man. Musk is the odor which not only in the animals to which it has given a name, but in many others, is a specifically sexual odor, chiefly emitted during the sexual season. The sexual odors, indeed, of most animals seem to be modifications of musk. The Sphinx moth has a musky odor which is confined to the male and is doubtless sexual. Some lizards have a musky odor which is heightened at the sexual season; crocodiles during the pairing season emit from their submaxillary glands a musky odor which pervades their haunts. In the same way elephants emit a musky odor from their facial glands during the rutting season. The odor of the musk-duck is chiefly confined to the breeding season.[61] The musky odor of the negress is said to be heightened during sexual excitement.

The predominance of musk as a sexual odor is associated with the fact that its actual nervous influence, apart from the presence of sexual association, is very considerable. Fere found it to be a powerful muscular stimulant. In former times musk enjoyed a high reputation as a cardiac stimulant; it fell into disuse, but in recent years its use in asthenic states has been revived, and excellent results, it has been claimed, have followed its administration in cases of collapse from Asiatic cholera. For sexual torpor in women it still has (like vanilla and sandal) a certain degree of reputation, though it is not often used, and some of the old Arabian physicians (especially Avicenna) recommended it, with castoreum and myrrh, for amenorrhoea. Its powerful action is indicated by the experience of Esquirol, who stated that he had seen cases in which sensory stimulation by musk in women during lactation had produced mania. It has always had the reputation, more especially in the Mohammedan East, of being a sexual stimulant to men; "the noblest of perfumes," it is called in El Ktab, "and that which most provokes to venery."

It is doubtless a fact significant of the special sexual effects of musk that, as Laycock remarked, in cases of special idiosyncrasy to odors, musk appears to be that odor which is most liked or disliked. Thus, the old English physician Whytt remarked that "several delicate women who could easily bear the stronger smell of tobacco have been thrown into fits by musk, ambergris, or a pale rose."[62] It may be remarked that in the Perfumed Garden of Sheik Nefzaoui it is stated that it is by their sexual effects that perfumes tend to throw women into a kind of swoon, and Lucretius remarks that a woman who smells castoreum, another animal sexual perfume, at the time of her menstrual period may swoon.[63]

Not only is musk the most cherished perfume of the Islamic world, and the special favorite of the Prophet himself, who greatly delighted in perfumes ("I love your world," he is reported to have said in old age, "for its women and its perfumes"),[64] it is the only perfume generally used by the women of a land in which the refinements of life have been carried so far as Japan, and they received it from the Chinese.[65]

Moreover, musk is still the most popular of European perfumes. It is the perfumes containing musk, Piesse states in his well-known book on the Art of Perfumery, which sell best. It is certainly true that in its simple form the odor of musk is not nowadays highly considered in Europe. This fact is connected with the ever-growing refinement in accordance with which the specific odors of the sexual regions in human beings tend to lose their primitive attractiveness and bodily odors generally become mingled with artificial perfumes and so disguised. But, although musk in its simple form, and under its ancient name, has lost its hold in Europe, it is an interesting and significant fact that it is still the perfumes which contain musk that are the most widely popular.

Peau d'Espagne may be mentioned as a highly complex and luxurious perfume, often the favorite scent of sensuous persons, which really owes a large part of its potency to the presence of the crude animal sexual odors of musk and civet. It consists of wash-leather steeped in ottos of neroli, rose, santal, lavender, verbena, bergamot, cloves, and cinnamon, subsequently smeared with civet and musk. It is said by some, probably with a certain degree of truth, that Peau d'Espagne is of all perfumes that which most nearly approaches the odor of a woman's skin; whether it also suggests the odor of leather is not so clear.

There is, however, no doubt that the smell of leather has a curiously stimulating sexual influence on many men and women. It is an odor which seems to occupy an intermediate place between the natural body odors and the artificial perfumes for which it sometimes serves as a basis; possibly it is to this fact that its occasional sexual influence is owing, for, as we have already seen, there is a tendency for sexual allurement to attach to odors which are not the specific personal body odors but yet are related to them. Moll considers, no doubt rightly, that shoe fetichism, perhaps the most frequent of sexual fetichistic perversions, is greatly favored, if, indeed, it does not owe its origin to, the associated odor of the feet and of the shoes.[66] He narrates a case of shoe fetichism in a man in which the perversion began at the age of 6; when for the first time he wore new shoes, having previously used only the left-off shoes of his elder brother; he felt and smelt these new shoes with sensations of unmeasured pleasure; and a few years later began to use shoes as a method of masturbation.[67] Naecke has also recorded the case of a shoe fetichist who declared that the sexual attraction of shoes (usually his wife's) lay largely in the odor of the leather.[68] Krafft-Ebing, again, brings forward a case of shoe fetichism in which the significant fact is mentioned that the subject bought a pair of leather cuffs to smell while masturbating.[69] Restif de la Bretonne, who was somewhat of a shoe fetichist, appears to have enjoyed smelling shoes. It is not probable that the odor of leather explains the whole of shoe fetichism,—as we shall see when, in another "Study," this question comes before us—and in many cases it cannot be said to enter at all; it is, however, one of the factors. Such a conclusion is further supported by the fact that by many the odor of new shoes is sometimes desired as an adjuvant to coitus. It is in the experience of prostitutes that such a device is not infrequent. Naecke mentions that a colleague of his was informed by a prostitute that several of her clients desired the odor of new shoes in the room, and that she was accustomed to obtain the desired perfume by holding her shoes for a moment over the flame of a spirit lamp.

The direct sexual influence of the odor of leather is, however, more conclusively proved by those instances in which it exists apart from shoes or other objects having any connection with the human body. I have elsewhere in these "Studies"[71] recorded the case of a lady, entirely normal in sexual and other respects, who is conscious of a considerable degree of pleasurable sexual excitement in the presence of the smell of leather objects, more especially of leather-bound ledgers and in shops where leather objects are sold. She thinks this dates from the period when, as a child of 9, she was sometimes left alone for a time on a high stool in an office. A possible explanation in this case lies in the supposition that on one of these early occasions sexual excitement was produced by the contact with the stool (in a way that is not infrequent in young girls) and that the accidentally associated odor of leather permanently affected the nervous system, while the really significant contact left no permanent impression. Even on such a supposition it might, however, still be maintained that a real potency of the leather odor is illustrated by this case, and this is likewise suggested by the fact that the same subject is also sexually affected by various perfumes and odorous flowers not recalling leather.[70]

It has been suggested to me by a lady that the odor of leather suggests that of the sexual organs. The same suggestion is made by Hagen,[72] and I find it stated by Gould and Pyle that menstruating girls sometimes smell of leather. The secret of its influence may thus be not altogether obscure; in the fact that leather is animal skin, and that it may thus vaguely stir the olfactory sensibilities which had been ancestrally affected by the sexual stimulus of the skin odor lies the probable foundation of the mystery.

In the absence of all suggestion of personal or animal odors, in its most exquisite forms in the fragrance of flowers, olfactory sensations are still very frequently of a voluptuous character. Mantegazza has remarked that it is a proof of the close connection between the sense of smell and the sexual organs that the expression of pleasure produced by olfaction resembles the expression of sexual pleasures.[73] Make the chastest woman smell the flowers she likes best, he remarks, and she will close her eyes, breathe deeply, and, if very sensitive, tremble all over, presenting an intimate picture which otherwise she never shows, except perhaps to her lover. He mentions a lady who said: "I sometimes feel such pleasure in smelling flowers that I seem to be committing a sin."[74] It is really the case that in many persons—usually, if not exclusively, women—the odor of flowers produces not only a highly pleasurable, but a distinctly and specifically sexual, effect. I have met with numerous cases in which this effect was well marked. It is usually white flowers with heavy, penetrating odors which exert this influence. Thus, one lady (who is similarly affected by various perfumes, forget-me-nots, ylang-ylang, etc.) finds that a number of flowers produce on her a definite sexual effect, with moistening of the pudenda. This effect is especially produced by white flowers like the gardenia, tuberose, etc. Another lady, who lives in India, has a similar experience with flowers. She writes: A scent to cause me sexual excitement must be somewhat heavy and penetrating. Nearly all white flowers so affect me and many Indian flowers with heavy, almost pungent scents. (All the flower scents are quite unconnected with me with any individual.) Tuberose, lilies of the valley, and frangipani flowers have an almost intoxicating effect on me. Violets, roses, mignonette, and many others, though very delicious, give me no sexual feeling at all. For this reason the line, 'The lilies and languors of virtue for the roses and raptures of vice' seems all wrong to me. The lily seems to me a very sensual flower, while the rose and its scent seem very good and countrified and virtuous. Shelley's description of the lily of the valley, 'whom youth makes so fair and passion so pale,' falls in much more with my ideas. "I can quite understand," she adds, "that leather, especially of books, might have an exciting effect, as the smell has this penetrating quality, but I do not think it produces any special feeling in me." This more sensuous character of white flowers is fairly obvious to many persons who do not experience from them any specifically sexual effects. To some people lilies have an odor which they describe as sexual, although these persons may be quite unaware that Hindu authors long since described the vulvar secretion of the Padmini, or perfect woman, during coitus, as "perfumed like the lily that has newly burst."[75] It is noteworthy that it was more especially the white flowers—lily, tuberose, etc.—which were long ago noted by Cloquet as liable to cause various unpleasant nervous effects, cardiac oppression and syncope.[76]

When we are concerned with the fragrances of flowers it would seem that we are far removed from the human sexual field, and that their sexual effects are inexplicable. It is not so. The animal and vegetable odors, as, indeed, we have already seen, are very closely connected. The recorded cases are very numerous in which human persons have exhaled from their skins—sometimes in a very pronounced degree—the odors of plants and flowers, of violets, of roses, of pineapple, of vanilla. On the other hand, there are various plant odors which distinctly recall, not merely the general odor of the human body, but even the specifically sexual odors. A rare garden weed, the stinking goosefoot, Chenopodium vulvaria, it is well known, possesses a herring brine or putrid fish odor—due, it appears, to propylamin, which is also found in the flowers of the common white thorn or mayflower (Crataegus oxyacantha) and many others of the Rosaceae—which recalls the odor of the animal and human sexual regions.[77] The reason is that both plant and animal odors belong chemically to the same group of capryl odors (Linnaeus's Odores hircini), so called from the goat, the most important group of odors from the sexual point of view. Caproic and capryl acid are contained not only in the odor of the goat and in human sweat, and in animal products as many cheeses, but also in various plants, such as Herb Robert (Geranium robertianum), and the Stinking St. John's worts (Hypericum hircinum), as well as the Chenopodium. Zwaardemaker considers it probable that the odor of the vagina belongs to the same group, as well as the odor of semen (which Haller called odor aphrodisiacus), which last odor is also found, as Cloquet pointed out, in the flowers of the common berberry (Berberis vulgaris) and in the chestnut. A very remarkable and significant example of the same odor seems to occur in the case of the flowers of the henna plant, the white-flowered Lawsonia (Lawsonia inermis), so widely used in some Mohammedan lands for dyeing the nails and other parts of the body. "These flowers diffuse the sweetest odor," wrote Sonnini in Egypt a century ago; "the women delight to wear them, to adorn their houses with them, to carry them to the baths, to hold them in their hands, and to perfume their bosoms with them. They cannot patiently endure that Christian and Jewish women shall share the privilege with them. It is very remarkable that the perfume of the henna flowers, when closely inhaled, is almost entirely lost in a very decided spermatic odor. If the flowers are crushed between the fingers this odor prevails, and is, indeed, the only one perceptible. It is not surprising that so delicious a flower has furnished Oriental poetry with many charming traits and amorous similes." Such a simile Sonnini finds in the Song of Songs, i. 13-14.[78]

The odor of semen has not been investigated, but, according to Zwaardemaker, artificially produced odors (like cadaverin) resemble it. The odor of the leguminous fenugreek, a botanical friend considers, closely approaches the odor given off in some cases by the armpit in women. It is noteworthy that fenugreek contains cumarine, which imparts its fragrance to new-mown hay and to various flowers of somewhat similar odor. On some persons these have a sexually exciting effect, and it is of considerable interest to observe that they recall to many the odor of semen. "It seems very natural," a lady writes, "that flowers, etc., should have an exciting effect, as the original and by far the pleasantest way of love-making was in the open among flowers and fields; but a more purely physical reason may, I think, be found in the exact resemblance between the scent of semen and that of the pollen of flowering grasses. The first time I became aware of this resemblance it came on me with a rush that here was the explanation of the very exciting effect of a field of flowering grasses and, perhaps through them, of the scents of other flowers. If I am right, I suppose flower scents should affect women more powerfully than men in a sexual way. I do not think anyone would be likely to notice the odor of semen in this connection unless they had been greatly struck by the exciting effects of the pollen of grasses. I had often noticed it and puzzled over it." As pollen is the male sexual element of flowers, its occasionally stimulating effect in this direction is perhaps but an accidental result of a unity running through the organic world, though it may be perhaps more simply explained as a special form of that nasal irritation which is felt by so many persons in a hay-field. Another correspondent, this time a man, tells me that he has noted the resemblance of the odor of semen to that of crushed grasses. A scientific friend who has done much work in the field of organic chemistry tells me he associates the odor of semen with that produced by diastasic action on mixing flour and water, which he regards as sexual in character. This again brings us to the starchy products of the leguminous plants. It is evident that, subtle and obscure as many questions in the physiology and psychology of olfaction still remain, we cannot easily escape from their sexual associations.

FOOTNOTES:

[53] H. Beauregard, Matiere Medicale Zooelogique: Histoire des Drogues d'origine Animate, 1901.

[54] Professor Plateau, of Ghent, has for many years carried on a series of experiments which would even tend to show that insects are scarcely attracted by the colors of flowers at all, but mainly influenced by a sense which would appear to be smell. His experiments have been recorded during recent years (from 1887) in the Bulletins de l'Academie Royale de Belgique, and have from time to time been summarized in Nature, e.g., February 5, 1903.

[55] David Sharp, Cambridge Natural History: Insects, Part II, p. 398.

[56] Mantegazza, Fisiologia dell' Amore, 1873, p. 176.

[57] Mantegazza (L'Amour dans l'Humanite, p. 94) refers to various peoples who practice this last custom. Egypt was a great centre of the practice more than 3000 years ago.

[58] Hagen, Sexuelle Osphresiologie, 1901, p. 226. It has been suggested to me by a medical correspondent that one of the primitive objects of the hair, alike on head, mons veneris, and axilla, was to collect sweat and heighten its odor to sexual ends.

[59] The names of all our chief perfumes are Arabic or Persian: civet, musk, ambergris, attar, camphor, etc.

[60] Cloquet (Osphresiologie, pp. 73-76) has an interesting passage on the prevalence of the musk odor in animals, plants, and even mineral substances.

[61] Laycock brings together various instances of the sexual odors of animals, insisting on their musky character (Nervous Diseases of Women; section, "Odors"). See also a section in the Descent of Man (Part II, Chapter XVIII), in which Darwin argues that "the most odoriferous males are the most successful in winning the females." Distant also has an interesting paper on this subject, "Biological Suggestions," Zooelogist, May, 1902; he points out the significant fact that musky odors are usually confined to the male, and argues that animal odors generally are more often attractive than protective.

[62] R. Whytt, Works, 1768, p. 543.

[63] Lucretius, VI, 790-5.

[64] Mohammed, said Ayesha, was very fond of perfumes, especially "men's scents," musk and ambergris. He used also to burn camphor on odoriferous wood and enjoy the fragrant smell, while he never refused perfumes when offered them as a present. The things he cared for most, said Ayesha, were women, scents, and foods. Muir, Life of Mahomet, vol. iii, p. 297.

[65] H. ten Kate, International Centralblatt fuer Anthropologie, Ht. 6, 1902. This author, who made observations on Japanese with Zwaardemaker's olfactometer, found that, contrary to an opinion sometimes stated, they have a somewhat defective sense of smell. He remarks that there are no really native Japanese perfumes.

[66] Moll: Die Kontraere Sexualempfindung, third edition, 1890, p. 306.

[67] Moll: Libido Sexualis, bd. 1, p. 284.

[68] P. Naecke, "Un Cas de Fetichisme de Souliers," Bulletin de la Societe de Medecine Mentale de Belgique, 1894.

[69] Psychopathia Sexualis, English edition, p. 167.

[70] Philip Salmuth (Observationes Medicae, Centuria II, no. 63) in the seventeenth century recorded a case in which a young girl of noble birth (whose sister was fond of eating chalk, cinnamon, and cloves) experienced extreme pleasure in smelling old books. It would appear, however, that in this case the fascination lay not so much in the odor of the leather as in the mouldy odor of worm-eaten books; "faetore veterum liborum, a blattis et tineis exesorum, situque prorsus corruptorum" are Salmuth's words.

[71] Studies in the Psychology of Sex, vol. iii, "Appendix B, History VIII."

[72] Sexuelle Osphresiologie, p. 106.

[73] Mantegazza, Fisiologia dell' Amore, p. 176.

[74] In this connection I may quote the remark of the writer of a thoughtful article in the Journal of Psychological Medicine, 1851: "The use of scents, especially those allied to the musky, is one of the luxuries of women, and in some constitutions cannot be indulged without some danger to the morals, by the excitement to the ovaria which results. And although less potent as aphrodisiacs in their action on the sexual system of women than of men, we have reason to think that they cannot be used to excess with impunity by most."

[75] Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana, 1883, p. 5.

[76] Cloquet, Osphresiologie, p. 95.

[77] In Normandy the Chenopodium, it is said, is called "conio," and in Italy erba connina (con, cunnus), on account of its vulvar odor. The attraction of dogs to this plant has been noted. In the same way cats are irresistibly attracted to preparations of valerian because their own urine contains valerianic acid.

[78] Sonnini, Voyage dans la Haute et Basse Egypte, 1799, vol. i. p. 298.



V.

The Evil Effects of Excessive Olfactory Stimulation—The Symptoms of Vanillism—The Occasional Dangerous Results of the Odors of Flowers—Effects of Flowers on the Voice.

The reality of the olfactory influences with which we have been concerned, however slight they may sometimes appear, is shown by the fact that odors, both agreeable and disagreeable, are stimulants, obeying the laws which hold good for stimulants generally. They whip up the nervous energies momentarily, but in the end, if the excitation is excessive and prolonged, they produce fatigue and exhaustion. This is clearly shown by Fere's elaborate experiments on the influences of odors, as compared with other sensory stimulants, on the amount of muscular work performed with the ergograph.[79] Commenting on the remark of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, that "man uses perfumes to impart energy to his passion," Fere remarks: "But perfumes cannot keep up the fires which they light." Their prolonged use involves fatigue, which is not different from that produced by excessive work, and reproduces all the bodily and psychic accompaniments of excessive work.[80] It is well known that workers in perfumes are apt to suffer from the inhalation of the odors amid which they live. Dealers in musk are said to be specially liable to precocious dementia. The symptoms generally experienced by the men and women who work in vanilla factories where the crude fruit is prepared for commerce have often been studied and are well known. They are due to the inhalation of the scent, which has all the properties of the aromatic aldehydes, and include skin eruptions,[81] general excitement, sleeplessness, headache, excessive menstruation, and irritable bladder. There is nearly always sexual excitement, which may be very pronounced.[82]

We are here in the presence, it may be insisted, not of a nervous influence only, but of a direct effect of odor on the vital processes. The experiments of Tardif on the influence of perfumes on frogs and rabbits showed that a poisonous effect was exerted;[83] while Fere, by incubating fowls' eggs in the presence of musk, found repeatedly that many abnormalities occurred, and that development was retarded even in the embryos that remained normal; while he obtained somewhat similar results by using essences of lavender, cloves, etc.[84] The influence of odors is thus deeper than is indicated by their nervous effects; they act directly on nutrition. We are led, as Passy remarks, to regard odors as very intimately related to the physiological properties of organic substances, and the sense of smell as a detached fragment of generally sensibility, reacting to the same stimuli as general sensibility, but highly specialized in view of its protective function.

The reality and subtlety of the influence of odors is further shown, by the cases in which very intense effects are produced even by the temporary inhalation of flowers or perfumes or other odors. Such cases of idiosyncrasy in which a person—frequently of somewhat neurotic temperament—becomes acutely sensitive to some odor or odors have been recorded in medical literature for many centuries. In these cases the obnoxious odor produces congestion of the respiratory passages, sneezing, headache, fainting, etc., but occasionally, it has been recorded, even death. (Dr. J.N. Mackenzie, in his interesting and learned paper on "The Production of the so-called 'Rose Cold,' etc.," American Journal of Medical Sciences, January, 1886, quotes many cases, and gives a number of references to ancient medical authors; see also Layet, art. "Odeur," Dictionnaire Encyclopedique des Sciences Medicales.)

An interesting phenomenon of the group—though it is almost too common to be described as an idiosyncrasy—is the tendency of the odor of certain flowers to affect the voice and sometimes even to produce complete loss of voice. The mechanism of the process is not fully understood, but it would appear that congestion and paresis of the larynx is produced and spasm of the bronchial tube. Botallus in 1565 recorded cases in which the scent of flowers brought on difficulty of breathing, and the danger of flowers from this point of view is well recognized by professional singers. Joal has studied this question in an elaborate paper (summarized in the British Medical Journal, March 3, 1895), and Dr. Cabanes has brought together (Figaro, January 20, 1894) the experiences of a number of well-known singers, teachers of singing, and laryngologists. Thus, Madame Renee Richard, of the Paris Opera, has frequently found that when her pupils have arrived with a bunch of violets fastened to the bodice or even with a violet and iris sachet beneath the corset, the voice has been marked by weakness and, on using the laryngoscope, she has found the vocal cords congested. Madame Calve confirmed this opinion, and stated that she was specially sensitive to tuberose and mimosa, and that on one occasion a bouquet of white lilac has caused her, for a time, complete loss of voice. The flowers mentioned are equally dangerous to a number of other singers; the most injurious flower of all is found to be the violet. The rose is seldom mentioned, and artificial perfumes are comparatively harmless, though some singers consider it desirable to be cautious in using them.

FOOTNOTES:

[79] Fere, Travail et Plaisir, Chapter XIII.

[80] Travail et Plaisir, p. 175. It is doubtless true of the effects of odors on the sexual sphere. Fere records the case of a neurasthenic lady whose sexual coldness toward her husband only disappeared after the abandonment of a perfume (in which heliotrope was apparently the chief constituent) she had been accustomed to use in excessive amounts.

[81] It is perhaps significant that many colors are especially liable to produce skin disorders, especially urticaria; a number of cases have been recorded by Joal, Journal de Medecine, July 10, 1899.

[82] Layet, art. "Vanillisme," Dictionnaire Encyclopedique des Sciences Medicales; cf. Audeoud, Revue Medicale de la Suisse Romande, October 20, 1899, summarized in the British Medical Journal, 1899.

[83] E. Tardif, Les Odeurs et Parfums, Chapter III.

[84] Fere, Societe de Biologie, March 28, 1896.



VI.

The Place of Smell in Human Sexual Selections—It has given Place to the Predominance of Vision largely because in Civilized Man it Fails to Act at a Distance—It still Plays a Part by Contributing to the Sympathies or the Antipathies of Intimate Contact.

When we survey comprehensively the extensive field we have here rapidly traversed, it seems not impossible to gain a fairly accurate view of the special place which olfactory sensations play in human sexual selection. The special peculiarity of this group of sensations in man, and that which gives them an importance they would not otherwise possess, is due to the fact that we here witness the decadence of a sense which in man's remote ancestors was the very chiefest avenue of sexual allurement. In man, even the most primitive man,—to some degree even in the apes,—it has declined in importance to give place to the predominance of vision.[85] Yet, at that lower threshold of acuity at which it persists in man it still bathes us in a more or less constant atmosphere of odors, which perpetually move us to sympathy or to antipathy, and which in their finer manifestations we do not neglect, but even cultivate with the increase of our civilization.

It thus comes about that the grosser manifestations of sexual allurement by smell belong, so far as man is concerned, to a remote animal past which we have outgrown and which, on account of the diminished acuity of our olfactory organs, we could not completely recall even if we desired to; the sense of sight inevitably comes into play long before it is possible for close contact to bring into action the sense of smell. But the latent possibilities of sexual allurement by olfaction, which are inevitably embodied in the nervous structure we have inherited from our animal ancestors, still remain ready to be called into play. They emerge prominently from time to time in exceptional and abnormal persons. They tend to play an unusually larger part in the psychic lives of neurasthenic persons, with their sensitive and comparatively unbalanced nervous systems, and this is doubtless the reason why poets and men of letters have insisted on olfactory impressions so frequently and to so notable a degree; for the same reason sexual inverts are peculiarly susceptible to odors. For a different reason, warmer climates, which heighten all odors and also favor the growth of powerfully odorous plants, lead to a heightened susceptibility to the sexual and other attractions of smell even among normal persons; thus we find a general tendency to delight in odors throughout the East, notably in India, among the ancient Hebrews, and in Mohammedan lands.

Among the ordinary civilized population in Europe the sexual influences of smell play a smaller and yet not altogether negligible part. The diminished prominence of odors only enables them to come into action, as sexual influences, on close contact, when, in some persons at all events, personal odors may have a distinct influence in heightening sympathy or arousing antipathy. The range of variation among individuals is in this matter considerable. In a few persons olfactory sympathy or antipathy is so pronounced that it exerts a decisive influence in their sexual relationships; such persons are of olfactory type. In other persons smell has no part in constituting sexual relationships, but it comes into play in the intimate association of love, and acts as an additional excitant; when reinforced by association such olfactory impressions may at times prove irresistible. Other persons, again, are neutral in this respect, and remain indifferent either to the sympathetic or antipathetic working of personal odors, unless they happen to be extremely marked. It is probable that the majority of refined and educated people belong to the middle group of those persons who are not of predominantly olfactory type, but are liable from time to time to be influenced in this manner. Women are probably at least as often affected in this manner as men, probably more often.

On the whole, it may be said that in the usual life of man odors play a not inconsiderable part and raise problems which are not without interest, but that their demonstrable part in actual sexual selection—whether in preferential mating or in assortative mating—is comparatively small.

FOOTNOTES:

[85] Moll has a passage on this subject, Untersuchungen ueber die Libido Sexualis. Bd. I, pp. 376-381.



HEARING.

I.

The Physiological Basis of Rhythm—Rhythm as a Physiological Stimulus—The Intimate Relation of Rhythm to Movement—The Physiological Influence of Music on Muscular Action, Circulation, Respiration, etc.—The Place of Music in Sexual Selection among the Lower Animals—Its Comparatively Small Place in Courtship among Mammals—The Larynx and Voice in Man—The Significance of the Pubertal Changes—Ancient Beliefs Concerning the Influence of Music in Morals, Education, and Medicine—Its Therapeutic Uses—Significance of the Romantic Interest in Music at Puberty—Men Comparatively Insusceptible to the Specifically Sexual Influence of Music—Rarity of Sexual Perversions on the Basis of the Sense of Hearing—The Part of Music in Primitive Human Courtship—Women Notably Susceptible to the Specifically Sexual Influence of Music and the Voice.

The sense of rhythm—on which it may be said that the sensory exciting effects of hearing, including music, finally rest—may probably be regarded as a fundamental quality of neuro-muscular tissue. Not only are the chief physiological functions of the body, like the circulation and the respiration, definitely rhythmical, but our senses insist on imparting a rhythmic grouping even to an absolutely uniform succession of sensations. It seems probable, although this view is still liable to be disputed, that this rhythm is the result of kinaesthetic sensations,—sensations arising from movement or tension started reflexly in the muscles by the external stimuli,—impressing themselves on the sensations that are thus grouped.[86] We may thus say, with Wilks, that music appears to have had its origin in muscular action.[87]

Whatever its exact origin may be, rhythm is certainly very deeply impressed on our organisms. The result is that, whatever lends itself to the neuro-muscular rhythmical tendency of our organisms, whatever tends still further to heighten and develop that rhythmical tendency, exerts upon us a very decidedly stimulating and exciting influence.

All muscular action being stimulated by rhythm, in its simple form or in its more developed form as music, rhythm is a stimulant to work. It has even been argued by Buecher and by Wundt[88] that human song had its chief or exclusive origin in rhythmical vocal accompaniments to systematized work. This view cannot, however, be maintained; systematized work can scarcely be said to exist, even to-day, among most very primitive races; it is much more probable that rhythmical song arose at a period antecedent to the origin of systematized work, in the primitive military, religious, and erotic dances, such as exist in a highly developed degree among the Australians and other savage races who have not evolved co-ordinated systematic labor. There can, however, be no doubt that as soon as systematic work appears the importance of vocal rhythm in stimulating its energy is at once everywhere recognized. Buecher has brought together innumerable examples of this association, and in the march music of soldiers and the heaving and hoisting songs of sailors we have instances that have universally persisted into civilization, although in civilization the rhythmical stimulation of work, physiologically sound as is its basis, tends to die out. Even in the laboratory the influence of simple rhythm in increasing the output of work may be demonstrated; and Fere found with the ergograph that a rhythmical grouping of the movements caused an increase of energy which often more than compensated the loss of time caused by the rhythm.[89]

Rhythm is the most primitive element of music, and the most fundamental. Wallaschek, in his book on Primitive Music, and most other writers on the subject are agreed on this point. "Rhythm," remarks an American anthropologist,[90] "naturally precedes the development of any fine perception of differences in pitch, of time-quality, or of tonality. Almost, if not all, Indian songs," he adds, "are as strictly developed out of modified repetitions of a motive as are the movements of a Mozart or a Beethoven symphony." "In all primitive music," asserts Alice C. Fletcher,[91] "rhythm is strongly developed. The pulsations of the drum and the sharp crash of the rattles are thrown against each other and against the voice, so that it would seem that the pleasure derived by the performers lay not so much in the tonality of the song as in the measured sounds arrayed in contesting rhythm, and which by their clash start the nerves and spur the body to action, for the voice which alone carries the tone is often subordinated and treated as an additional instrument." Groos points out that a melody gives us the essential impression of a voice that dances;[92] it is a translation of spatial movement into sound, and, as we shall see, its physiological action on the organism is a reflection of that which, as we have elsewhere found,[93] dancing itself produces, and thus resembles that produced by the sight of movement. Dancing, music, and poetry were primitively so closely allied as to be almost identical; they were still inseparable among the early Greeks. The refrains in our English ballads indicate the dancer's part in them. The technical use of the word "foot" in metrical matters still persists to show that a poem is fundamentally a dance.

Aristotle seems to have first suggested that rhythm and melodies are motions, as actions are motions, and therefore signs of feeling. "All melodies are motions," says Helmholtz. "Graceful rapidity, gravel procession, quiet advance, wild leaping, all these different characters of motion and a thousand others can be represented by successions of tones. And as music expresses these motions it gives an expression also to those mental conditions which naturally evoke similar motions, whether of the body and the voice, or of the thinking and feeling principle itself." (Helmholtz, On the Sensations of Tone, translated by A. J. Ellis, 1885, p. 250.)

From another point of view the motor stimulus of music has been emphasized by Cyples: "Music connects with the only sense that can be perfectly manipulated. Its emotional charm has struck men as a great mystery. There appears to be no doubt whatever that it gets all the marvelous effects it has beyond the mere pleasing of the ear, from its random, but multitudinous summonses of the efferent activity, which at its vague challenges stirs unceasingly in faintly tumultuous irrelevancy. In this way, music arouses aimlessly, but splendidly, the sheer, as yet unfulfilled, potentiality within us." (W. Copies, The Process of Human Experience, p. 743.)

The fundamental element of transformed motion in music has been well brought out in a suggestive essay by Goblot ("La Musique Descriptive," Revue Philosophique, July, 1901): "Sung or played, melody figures to the ear a successive design, a moving arabesque. We talk of ascending and descending the gamut, of high notes or low notes; the; higher voice of woman is called soprano, or above, the deeper voice of man is called bass. Grave tones were so called by the Greeks because they seemed heavy and to incline downward. Sounds seem to be subject to the action of gravity; so that some rise and others fall. Baudelaire, speaking of the prelude to Lohengrin, remarks: 'I felt myself delivered from the bonds of weight.' And when Wagner sought to represent, in the highest regions of celestial space, the apparition of the angels bearing the Holy Grail to earth, he uses very high notes, and a kind of chorus played exclusively by the violins, divided into eight parts, in the highest notes of their register. The descent to earth of the celestial choir is rendered by lower and lower notes, the progressive disappearance of which represents the reascension to the ethereal regions.

"Sounds seem to rise and fall; that is a fact. It is difficult to explain it. Some have seen in it a habit derived from the usual notation by which the height of the note corresponds to its height in the score. But the impression is too deep and general to be explained by so superficial and recent a cause. It has been suggested also that high notes are generally produced by small and light bodies, low notes by heavy bodies. But that is not always true. It has been said, again, that high notes in nature are usually produced by highly placed objects, while low notes arise from caves and low placed regions. But the thunder is heard in the sky, and the murmur of a spring or the song of a cricket arise from the earth. In the human voice, again, it is said, the low notes seem to resound in the chest, high notes in the head. All this is unsatisfactory. We cannot explain by such coarse analogies an impression which is very precise, and more sensible (this fact has its importance) for an interval of half a tone than for an interval of an octave. It is probable that the true explanation is to be found in the still little understood connection between the elements of our nervous apparatus.

"Nearly all our emotions tend to produce movement. But education renders us economical of our acts. Most of these movements are repressed, especially in the adult and civilized man, as harmful, dangerous, or merely useless. Some are not completed, others are reduced to a faint incitation which externally is scarcely perceptible. Enough remain to constitute all that is expressive in our gestures, physiognomy, and attitudes. Melodic intervals possess in a high degree this property of provoking impulses of movement, which, even when repressed, leave behind internal sensations and motor images. It would be possible to study these facts experimentally if we had at our disposition a human being who, while retaining his sensations and their motor reactions, was by special circumstances rendered entirely spontaneous like a sensitive automaton, whose movements were neither intentionally produced nor intentionally repressed. In this way, melodic intervals in a hypnotized subject might be very instructive."

A number of experiments of the kind desired by Goblot had already been made by A. de Rochas in a book, copiously illustrated by very numerous instantaneous photographs, entitled Les Sentiments, la Musique et la Geste, 1900. Chapter III. De Rochas experimented on a single subject, Lina, formerly a model, who was placed in a condition of slight hypnosis, when various simple fragments of music were performed: recitatives, popular airs, and more especially national dances, often from remote parts of the world. The subject's gestures were exceedingly marked and varied in accordance with the character of the music. It was found that she often imitated with considerable precision the actual gestures of dances she could never have seen. The same music always evoked the same gestures, as was shown by instantaneous photographs. This subject, stated to be a chaste and well-behaved girl, exhibited no indications of definite sexual emotion under the influence of any kind of music. Some account is given in the same volume of other hypnotic experiments with music which were also negative as regards specific sexual phenomena.

It must be noted that, as a physiological stimulus, a single musical note is effective, even apart from rhythm, as is well shown by Fere's experiments with the dynamometer and the ergograph.[94] It is, however, the influence of music on muscular work which has been most frequently investigated, and both on brief efforts with the dynamometer and prolonged work with the ergograph it has been found to exert a stimulating influence. Thus, Scripture found that, while his own maximum thumb and finger grip with the dynamometer is 8 pounds, when the giant's motive from Wagner's Rheingold is played it rises to 83/4 pounds.[95] With the ergograph Tarchanoff found that lively music, in nervously sensitive persons, will temporarily cause the disappearance of fatigue, though slow music in a minor key had an opposite effect.[96] The varying influence on work with the ergograph of different musical intervals and different keys has been carefully studied by Fere with many interesting results. There was a very considerable degree of constancy in the results. Discords were depressing; most, but not all, major keys were stimulating; and most, but not all, minor keys depressing. In states of fatigue, however, the minor keys were more stimulating than the major, an interesting result in harmony with that stimulating influence of various painful emotions in states of organic fatigue which we have elsewhere encountered when investigating sadism.[97] "Our musical culture," Fere remarks, "only renders more perceptible to us the unconscious relationships which exist between musical art and our organisms. Those whom we consider more endowed in this respect have a deeper penetration of the phenomena accomplished within them; they feel more profoundly the marvelous reactions between the organism and the principles of musical art, they experience more strongly that art is within them."[98] Both the higher and the lower muscular processes, the voluntary and the involuntary, are stimulated by music. Darlington and Talbot, in Titchener's laboratory at Cornell University, found that the estimation of relative weights was aided by music.[99] Lombard found, when investigating the normal variations in the knee-jerk, that involuntary reflex processes are always reinforced by music; a military band playing a lively march caused the knee-jerk to increase at the loud passages and to diminish at the soft passages, while remaining always above the normal level.[100]

With this stimulating influence of rhythm and music on the neuro-muscular system—which may or may not be direct—there is a concomitant influence on the circulatory and breathing apparatus. During recent years a great many experiments have been made on man and animals bearing on the effects of music on the heart and respiration. Perhaps the earliest of these were carried out by the Russian physiologist Dogiel in 1880.[101] His methods were perhaps defective and his results, at all events as regards man, uncertain, but in animals the force and rapidity of the heart were markedly increased. Subsequent investigations have shown very clearly the influence of music on the circulatory and respiratory systems in man as well as in animals. That music has an apparently direct influence on the circulation of the brain is shown by the observations of Patrizi on a youth who had received a severe wound of the head which had removed a large portion of the skull wall. The stimulus of melody produced an immediate increase in the afflux of blood to the brain.[102]

In Germany the question was investigated at about the same time by Mentz.[103] Observing the pulse with a sphygmograph and Marey tambour he found distinct evidence of an effect on the heart; when attention was given to the music the pulse was quickened, in the absence of attention it was slowed; Mentz also found that pleasurable sensations tended to slow the pulse and disagreeable ones to quicken it.

Binet and Courtier made an elaborate series of experiments on the action of music on the respiration (with the double pneumograph), the heart, and the capillary circulation (with the plethysmograph of Hallion and Comte) on a single subject, a man very sensitive to music and himself a cultured musician. Simple musical sounds with no emotional content accelerated the respiration without changing its regularity or amplitude. Musical fragments, mostly sung, usually well known to the subject, and having an emotional effect on him, produced respiratory irregularity either in amplitude or rapidity of breathing, in two-thirds of the trials. Exciting music, such as military marches, accelerated the breathing more than sad melodies, but the intensity of the excitation had an effect at least as great as its quality, for intense excitations always produced both quickened and deeper breathing. The heart was quickened in harmony with the quickened breathing. Neither breathing nor heart was ever slowed. As regards the capillary pulsation, an influence was exerted chiefly, if not exclusively, by gay and exciting melodies, which produced a shrinking. Throughout the experiments it was found that the most profound physiological effects were exerted by those pieces which the subject found to be most emotional in their influence on him.[104]

Guibaud studied the question on a number of subjects, confirming and extending the conclusions of Binet and Courtier. He found that the reactions of different individuals varied, but that for the same individual reactions were constant. Circulatory reaction was more often manifest than respiratory reaction. The latter might be either a simultaneous modification of depth and of rapidity or of either of these. The circulatory reaction was a peripheral vasoconstriction with diminished fullness of pulse and slight acceleration of cardiac rhythm; there was never any distinct slowing of heart under the influence of music. Guibaud remarks that when people say they feel a shudder at some passage of music, this sensation of cold finds its explanation in the production of a peripheral vasoconstriction which may be registered by the plethysmograph.[105]