Page:Eleanor Gamble - The Applicability of Weber's Law to Smell.pdf/13

Rh odors which have very different stimulus-limina should have the same difference-limina, The other method is that of exhaustion, and depends on the fact that different odors exhaust the organ with different degrees of rapidity, so that a compound odor, continuously smelled, will alter in quality as first one and then another of its constituents disappears. One may smell continuously the substance to be tested, or may smell it before and after smelling repeatedly an odor very similar in quality. The principle of the method is the same in both cases, The permanency of the mixed odor depends primarily on the equality of rate at which its different constituents fatigue the organ. The more numerous the constituents, the more permanent the quality of the mixture. This fact is well recognized in the perfume industry. Fortunately for the trade, the odor of almost every flower (Sawer mentions jasmine as a unique exception) may be simulated by compounding the odors of other flowers. The odor of violet, for example, is given by a blend of the odors of acacia, rose, Florentine iris, tuberose and almond. The odors of most flowers, again, are possessed by certain chemicals. To the mixture is usually added some substance, such as styrax, amber, or vanilla, which evaporates slowly, and smells strongly enough to compensate parts of the other odors. This is done that quantities of the other odorous substances large enough to allow for evaporation may be put into the solution without raising the intensity of the smell to the neighborhood of the terminal stimulus-intensity. If, now, most smells are mixed, and if mixed smells alter in quality as the organ becomes fatigued, and if different olfactory qualities have not the same limina, then in quantitative work in smell, we are seeking to determine values which are continually changing according to laws which we do not know.

There is no classification of olfactory qualities, which is even provisionally satisfactory from any point of view but a perfumer's. We give to odors the names of the objects which most commonly give rise to them, or to something similar to them. We speak of a “fishy smell” as loosely as Homer, in the days when the terminology of color was in its infancy, spoke of the “wine-hued sea.” Yet the name of an odor is clearly and indisputably applicable only to the smell of that object from which the name is taken,

Giessler's classification of odors may be of value to psychology proper, but is of no value whatever to psychophysics.