Page:Personal beauty how to cultivate and preserve it in accordance with the laws of health (1870).djvu/119

 ignoring all our polite little attempts at escape, treat us to an extempore lecture on his hobby.

"The sense of smell," he begins, "is beyond all comparison the most delicate, ethereal, and noble of all the senses. You can put a grain of pure musk in a room for years, have your windows open, occupy it daily, but every person who enters will at once detect the perfume, and leave the apartment carrying with him some slight particle of musk. At the end of ten years, weigh your musk, and you will find the full grain, not diminished by the hundredth fraction of a milligramme. Can you see, feel, hear, taste these infinitely little molecules? No! you can only smell them. Mark the lower animals. Does the dog trust to eye or ear to recognize his master? No! to his scent alone.

"You doctors give your medicines by the stomach or the skin. If I were a doctor and had a diploma, I should found a new school. I would give my medicines by the nose. You smile. But I can prove to you that organic matter has ten-thousand-fold more influence when thus administered, than in any other way. I have a brother, a sturdy, sun-browned farmer, to whom the odor of his new-mown hay, to you so delicious, is a poison. It throws him into fits of stentorian sneezings, he chokes and gasps as if he would strangle. The doctors call it 'hay-asthma,' or 'rose cold,' and pour annually down his throat quarts of