Page:Dan McKenzie - Aromatics and the Soul.pdf/53

Rh caught and held by the cotton-wool filter. Again, in the case of the Banded Monk, the suggestion of odour is unmistakable in the tainting, as it were, of substances in her vicinity with her emanation. Further, if the guide to the males were something like a luminous undulation we should expect that, like the Bolboceros beetle and the badger, there would have been no blundering and going astray ; they would have precipitated themselves straight on to the female, or as near to her as they could get.

Moreover, although we are ourselves unable to detect any odorous emanation, may not our inability be due simply to the fact that our olfactory hairs are not susceptible to this particular stimulus ? It may be of the same nature as odour, and yet we may be unable to perceive it, just as the moths themselves seemed anosmic to what we would call the stenches Fabre filled his room with.

These critical questions seem to me to be difficult to answer. Nevertheless, our imagination is certainly staggered by the fact of a tiny creature like a moth being able to disseminate in the immensity of atmospheric space an odour capable of perception at such great distances as a mile or a mile and a half. Hero, with the Great Peacock’s power, could have summoned Leander from a hundred miles away.