, still remain ready to be called into play. They emerge
prominently from time to time in exceptional and abnormal persons. They
tend to play an unusually larger part in the psychic lives of neurasthenic
persons, with their sensitive and comparatively unbalanced nervous
systems, and this is doubtless the reason why poets and men of letters
have insisted on olfactory impressions so frequently and to so notable a
degree; for the same reason sexual inverts are peculiarly susceptible to
odors. For a different reason, warmer climates, which heighten all odors
and also favor the growth of powerfully odorous plants, lead to a
heightened susceptibility to the sexual and other attractions of smell
even among normal persons; thus we find a general tendency to delight in
odors throughout the East, notably in India, among the ancient Hebrews,
and in Mohammedan lands.

Among the ordinary civilized population in Europe the sexual influences of
smell play a smaller and yet not altogether negligible part. The
diminished prominence of odors only enables them to come into action, as
sexual influences, on close contact, when, in some persons at all events,
personal odors may have a distinct influence in heightening sympathy or
arousing antipathy. The range of variation among individuals is in this
matter considerable. In a few persons olfactory sympathy or antipathy is
so pronounced that it exerts a decisive influence in their sexual
relationships; such persons are of olfactory type. In other persons smell
has no part in constituting sexual relationships, but it comes into play
in the intimate association of love, and acts as an additional excitant;
when reinforced by association such olfactory impressions may at times
prove irresistible. Other persons, again, are neutral in this respect, and
remain indifferent either to the sympathetic or antipathetic working of
personal odors, unless they happen to be extremely marked. It is probable
that the majority of refined and educated people belong to the middle
group of those persons who are not of predominantly olfactory type, but
are liable from time to time to be influenced in this manner. Women are
probably at least as often affected in this manner as men, probably more
often.

On the whole, it may be said that in the usual life of man odors play a
not inconsiderable part and raise problems which are not without interest,
but that their demonstrable part in actual sexual selection--whether i