f
a good cook. But they are spared the pain of foul smells, and
possibly in this way they may incur some danger in civilised life
through not being able to detect the escape of sewer-gas or of
coal-gas into a house, or the putrid condition of ice-stored fish,
birds, and meat. A friend of my own, who is devoid of the sense of
smell, inherited this defect from his father, and has transmitted it
to some of his children. I was surprised to find in conversing with
him how often I alluded to smells, either pleasant or unpleasant, when
(as we had agreed he should) he would interrupt me and say that my
remark had no meaning for him.

Some have a far more acute sense of smell than others, and again some
men, probably without being more acutely endowed in that way, pay more
attention to smells, and use the memory of them in description and
conversation. Guy de Maupassant is remarkable as a writer for his
abundant introduction of references to agreeable and mysterious
perfumes, and also to repulsive odours. But some men certainly have an
exceptionally acute sense of smell, and can, on entering an empty
room, recognise that such and such a person has been there by the
faint traces--not of perfumery carried by the visitor--but of his
individual smell or odour. This brings us to one of the most important
facts about odorous bodies and the sense of smell, namely, that not
only do the various species of animals (and plants) each have their
own odour--often difficult or impossible for man, with his aborted
olfactory powers, to distinguish--but that every individual has its
own special odour. As to how far this can be considered a universal
disposition is doubtful. It is probable that the power of
discriminating such individual odours is limited (even in the case of
dogs, where it is sometimes very highly developed), to a power of
discriminating the distinctive smells of the individuals of certain
species of animals, and not of every individual of every species.
Everyone knows of the wonderful power of the bloodhound in tracking an
individual man by his smell, but dogs of other breeds also often
possess what seems to us extraordinary powers of the kind. On a pebbly
beach I pick up one smooth flint pebble as big as a walnut. It is
closely similar to thousands of others lying there. I hold it in my
hand without letting my fox-terrier see it, and then I throw it. It
drops some eighty yards off among the other pebbles, and I could not
myse