Page:Dan McKenzie - Aromatics and the Soul.pdf/72

60 tongue as having shades, doubtless because red, being the colour of blood and so of danger, always makes a strong appeal to the mind, an appeal which, among the responses, has led to special names being given to four of its tones.

The sense of hearing again, upon which speech is wholly dependent, has given rise to a multitude of words, many of them closely imitative of the sound, or onomatopoetic, with which words English, like the related German, is richly adorned.

Touch also has produced a number of descriptive epithets—“hot,” “cold,” “wet,” “dry,” “moist,” “clammy,” “rough,” “smooth,” as well as those like “heavy” and “light,” from the deep tactile sensibility.

Even taste has its vocabulary, a complete one, as it happens, since each of the four varieties of taste has its own appropriate name—“sweet,” “sour,” “bitter,” and “salt.”

But smell is speechless. We can truthfully say that in our native English language there is not a single word characterising any one of all the myriad odours in the world.

No doubt there are many words that we do apply to smells. But they are either borrowed from the vocabulary of one of the other senses, in order to describe a state of mind induced by the smell, or else they originate from some known odoriferous object.