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 w