Page:Dan McKenzie - Aromatics and the Soul.pdf/56

44 All they could tell would be that both were cold and sweet.

The popular phrase which refers the appreciation of the finer shades of taste to the “palate” we may therefore look upon as an attempt to express the feeling that delicate flavours are sensed somewhere higher up than in the mouth. So that a “man of taste” is really a man of smell, and all the literary eloquence in praise of wine and dainty food, to say nothing of the more prosy cookery books, is, in reality, a general hymn of adulation offered unwittingly to the nose !

Compared with sight and hearing, however, smell in man is only one of the minor senses. But, as if to make up for a position so inferior, it is remarkable as being the most subtle of all our senses, possibly, as some hold, because of the ancestral appeal to our (more or less repressed) animal nature. So subtle is it, indeed, that I am persuaded its stimuli may not, on occasion, emerge into consciousness at all. They remain below the threshold. So that, although subjected to their influence, we may remain ignorant of the cause of that influence. For smell often operates powerfully, not only in surreptitiously enriching and invigorating the mental impression of an event, but also in directing at times the flow of ideas into some particular channel independent