n," 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