sensibility is thus intensified.

Even in ordinary normal persons, however, there can be no doubt that
personal odor tends to play a not inconsiderable part in sexual
attractions and sexual repulsions. As a sexual excitant, indeed, it comes
far behind the stimuli received through the sense of sight. The
comparative bluntness of the sense of smell in man makes it difficult for
olfactory influence to be felt, as a rule, until the preliminaries of
courtship are already over; so that it is impossible for smell ever to
possess the same significance in sexual attraction in man that it
possesses in the lower animals. With that reservation there can be no
doubt that odor has a certain favorable or unfavorable influence in sexual
relationships in all human races from the lowest to the highest. The
Polynesian spoke with contempt of those women of European race who "have
no smell," and in view of the pronounced personal odor of so many savage
peoples as well as of the careful attention which they so often pay to
odors, we may certainly assume, even in the absence of much definite
evidence, that smell counts for much in their sexual relationships. This
is confirmed by such practices as that found among some primitive
peoples--as, it is stated, in the Philippines--of lovers exchanging their
garments to have the smell of the loved one about them. In the barbaric
stages of society this element becomes self-conscious and is clearly
avowed; personal odors are constantly described with complacency,
sometimes as mingled with the lavish use of artificial perfumes, in much
of the erotic literature produced in the highest stages of barbarism,
especially by Eastern peoples living in hot climates; it is only necessary
to refer to the _Song of Songs_, the _Arabian Nights_, and the Indian
treatises on love. Even in some parts of Europe the same influence is
recognized in the crudest animal form, and Krauss states that among the
Southern Slavs it is sometimes customary to leave the sexual parts
unwashed because a strong odor of these parts is regarded as a sexual
stimulant. Under the usual conditions of life in Europe personal odor has
sunk into the background; this has been so equally under the conditions of
classic, mediaeval, and modern life. Personal odor has been generally
regarded as unaesthetic; it has, for the most part, only been mentioned to
be reprobated, and even those poets and others who during recent centuries
have shown a sen