Page:Dan McKenzie - Aromatics and the Soul.pdf/122

110 But albeit so highly sensitive to minute traces, the sense occasionally fails to perceive a highly concentrated odour.

For example, every one is aware that a bunch of violets which is filling a room with its fragrance seems when held to the nose to have no smell at all, or at the most to have but a vague, indefinable sort of odour.

The effect, as a matter of fact, varies with the perfume employed. Some, like violets, have no smell at all. Others give a different smell when concentrated from what they give when dilute. Muskone, for one, the essential constituent of musk, has an odour of pines when concentrated ; and storax, a delightful perfume when dilute, is disagreeable when too powerful, and so on.

It is to be noted that the disagreeable character of these last is not due to the mental “cloying” or “sickening” of excessive sweetness; it is a definite odour. Nor is the anosmia for concentrated violets due to the exhaustion of the sense.

Heyninx, comparing, as we shall see, olfaction with vision, believes the indefinite odour of concentrated violets to be akin to the absence of colour in white light. But this explanation seems to me to be improbable, since the effect is due not to the combination of a number of odours, as white light is the combination of all the colours of the