of a perfume (in which heliotrope was apparently the chief
constituent) she had been accustomed to use in excessive amounts.

[81] It is perhaps significant that many colors are especially liable to
produce skin disorders, especially urticaria; a number of cases have been
recorded by Joal, _Journal de Medecine_, July 10, 1899.

[82] Layet, art. "Vanillisme," _Dictionnaire Encyclopedique des Sciences
Medicales_; cf. Audeoud, _Revue Medicale de la Suisse Romande_, October
20, 1899, summarized in the _British Medical Journal_, 1899.

[83] E. Tardif, _Les Odeurs et Parfums_, Chapter III.

[84] Fere, _Societe de Biologie_, March 28, 1896.

VI.

The Place of Smell in Human Sexual Selections--It has given Place to the
Predominance of Vision largely because in Civilized Man it Fails to Act at
a Distance--It still Plays a Part by Contributing to the Sympathies or the
Antipathies of Intimate Contact.

When we survey comprehensively the extensive field we have here rapidly
traversed, it seems not impossible to gain a fairly accurate view of the
special place which olfactory sensations play in human sexual selection.
The special peculiarity of this group of sensations in man, and that which
gives them an importance they would not otherwise possess, is due to the
fact that we here witness the decadence of a sense which in man's remote
ancestors was the very chiefest avenue of sexual allurement. In man, even
the most primitive man,--to some degree even in the apes,--it has declined
in importance to give place to the predominance of vision.[85] Yet, at
that lower threshold of acuity at which it persists in man it still bathes
us in a more or less constant atmosphere of odors, which perpetually move
us to sympathy or to antipathy, and which in their finer manifestations we
do not neglect, but even cultivate with the increase of our civilization.

It thus comes about that the grosser manifestations of sexual allurement
by smell belong, so far as man is concerned, to a remote animal past which
we have outgrown and which, on account of the diminished acuity of our
olfactory organs, we could not completely recall even if we desired to;
the sense of sight inevitably comes into play long before it is possible
for close contact to bring into action the sense of smell. But the latent
possibilities of sexual allurement by olfaction, which are inevitably
embodied in the nervous structure we have inherited from our animal
ancestors