y 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 b