Page:Dan McKenzie - Aromatics and the Soul.pdf/48

36 purples, its unattainable horizon-blue ? For our life is primarily one of vision.

I am sure his dreams, also, are compounded of the gorgeous odours of some other world, such odours as even our woods in autumn know nothing of.

But we must return again to science and Fabre. This time we shall accompany him on an excursion with the wonderful dog who is trained to discover for the gourmet the truffles that are growing deep in the soil.

Left to his own devices, we learn, the truffle-hunting dog indicates the position not only of truffles, but also of all manner of hypogean (underground) fungi, “the large and the small, the fresh and the putrid, the scented and the unscented, the fragrant and the stinking.” Only, he never at any time indicates the presence of the ordinary mushroom, not even while it is still underground, before it sprouts up as the fungus we know. And yet to our nostrils the mushroom has the same smell as many of the hypogean fungi he does indicate. Consequently, therefore, the dog is not guided to the deep fungi by what may be called the general odour common to all fungi. He must be able, that is to say, to distinguish the hypogean varieties by some quality which is not odour, or, at least, not odour as we understand it.