sitive delight and interest in odors--Herrick, Shelley,
Baudelaire, Zola, and Huysmans--have seldom ventured to insist that a
purely natural and personal odor can be agreeable. The fact that it may be
so, and that for most people such odors cannot be a matter of indifference
in the most intimate of all relationships, is usually only to be learned
casually and incidentally. There can be no doubt, however, that, as
Kiernan points out, the extent to which olfaction influences the sexual
sphere in civilized man has been much underestimated. We need not,
therefore, be surprised at the greater interest which has recently been
taken in this subject. As usually happens, indeed, there has been in some
writers a tendency to run to the opposite extreme, and we cannot, with
Gustav Jaeger, regard the sexual instinct as mainly or altogether an
olfactory matter.

Of the Padmini, the perfect woman, the "lotus woman," Hindu
writers say that "her sweat has the odor of musk," while the
vulgar woman, they say, smells of fish (_Kama Sutra of
Vatsyayana_). Ploss and Bartels (_Das Weib_, 1901, p. 218) bring
forward a passage from the Tamil _Kokkogam_, minutely describing
various kinds of sexual odor in women, which they regard as
resting on sound observation.

Four things in a woman, says the Arab, should be perfumed: the
mouth, the armpits, the pudenda, and the nose. The Persian poets,
in describing the body, delighted to use metaphors involving
odor. Not only the hair and the down on the face, but the chin,
the mouth, the beauty spots, the neck, all suggested odorous
images. The epithets applied to the hair frequently refer to
musk, ambergris, and civet. (_Anis El-Ochchaq_ translated by
Huart, _Bibliotheque de l'Ecole des Hautes Etudes_, fasc. 25,
1875.)

The Hebrew _Song of Songs_ furnishes a typical example of a very
beautiful Eastern love-poem in which the importance of the appeal
to the sense of smell is throughout emphasized. There are in this
short poem as many as twenty-four fairly definite references to
odors,--personal odors, perfumes, and flowers,--while numerous
other references to flowers, etc., seem to point to olfactory
associations. Both the lover and his sweetheart express pleasure
in each other's personal odor.

"My beloved is unto me," she sings, "as a bag of myrrh
That lieth between my breasts;
My