which has reached me concerning the attractiveness of the odor of peasants:  “One predominant attraction of these men is that they are pure and clean; their bodies in a state of healthy normal function.  Then they possess, if they are temperate, what the Greek poet Straton called the phydike chrotos (a quality which, according to this authority, is never found in women).  This ’natural fair perfume of the flesh’ is a peculiar attribute of young men who live in the open air and deal with natural objects.  Even their perspiration has an odor very different from that of girls in ball-rooms:  more refined, ethereal, pervasive, delicate, and difficult to seize.  When they have handled hay—­in the time of hay-harvest, or in winter, when they bring hay down from mountain huts—­the youthful peasants carry about with them the smell of ’a field the Lord hath blessed.’  Their bodies and their clothes exhale an indefinable fragrance of purity and sex combined.  Every gland of the robust frame seems to have accumulated scent from herbs and grasses, which slowly exudes from the cool, fresh skin of the lad.  You do not perceive it in a room.  You must take the young man’s hands and bury your face in them, or be covered with him under the same blanket in one bed, to feel this aroma.  No sensual impression on the nerves of smell is more poignantly impregnated with spiritual poetry—­the poetry of adolescence, and early hours upon the hills, and labor cheerfully accomplished, and the harvest of God’s gifts to man brought home by human industry.  It is worth mentioning that Aristophanes, in his description of the perfect Athenian Ephebus, dwells upon his being redolent of natural perfumes.”

    In a passage in the second part of Faust Goethe (who appears to
    have felt considerable interest in the psychology of smell) makes
    three women speak concerning the ambrosiacal odor of young men.

    In this connection, also, I note a passage in a poem ("Appleton
    House”) by our own English poet Marvell, which it is of interest
    to quote:—­

        “And now the careless victors play,
        Dancing the triumphs of the hay,
        When every mower’s wholesome heat
        Smells like an Alexander’s sweat. 
        Their females fragrant as the mead
        Which they in fairy circles tread,
        When at their dance’s end they kiss,
        Their new-mown hay not sweeter is.”

FOOTNOTES: 

[30] R. Andree, “Voelkergeruch,” in Ethnographische Parallelen, Neue Folge, 1889, pp. 213-222, brings together many passages describing the odors of various peoples.  Hagen, Sexuelle Osphresiologie, pp. 166 et seq., has a chapter on the subject; Joest, supplement to International Archiv fuer Ethnographie, 1893, p. 53, has an interesting passage on the smells of various races, as also Waitz, Introduction to Anthropology, p. 103.  Cf.  Sir H.H.  Johnston, British Central Africa, p. 395; T.H.  Parke, Experiences in Equatorial Africa, p. 409; E.H.  Man, Journal of the Anthropological Institute, 1889, p. 391; Brough Smyth, Aborigines of Victoria, vol. i, p. 7; d’Orbigny, L’Homme Americain, vol. i, p. 87, etc.