Page:Dan McKenzie - Aromatics and the Soul.pdf/60

48 the same clearness as a vanished scene or an old tune.

It may be found on trial that by concentrating the attention strongly upon some familiar smell, particularly if at the same time we stimulate the memory by picturing in our mind’s eye a scene in which that odour figured as a feature in the sensory landscape, we are sometimes able to recall its actual sensation. But the recollection lacks the intimate reality of visual and auditory images. Without doubt the mind’s eye and mind’s ear, when consciously aroused, are consistently more acute and their representations are more vivid than those of the mind’s olfactory organ.

When, for instance, I call to memory the drawing-room of my boyhood days, I can once more catch a faint reminiscence of the acid-sweet rose-leaves that filled it with perennial fragrance, but not until I have first of all recalled its pale greys and blues and its over-bright windows, not until I have listened once more to “The March of the Troubadours” my mother is playing on the old rosewood piano, like a call to some life greater, grander, and, above all, more simple than this bewildering affair !

People, Ribot has ascertained, vary considerably in their power of resuscitating dead perfumes. According to his statistics, 40 per cent. could not revive any image at all ; 48 per cent. could recall