the voice has been marked by weakness and, on using the laryngoscope, she has found the vocal cords congested.  Madame Calve confirmed this opinion, and stated that she was specially sensitive to tuberose and mimosa, and that on one occasion a bouquet of white lilac has caused her, for a time, complete loss of voice.  The flowers mentioned are equally dangerous to a number of other singers; the most injurious flower of all is found to be the violet.  The rose is seldom mentioned, and artificial perfumes are comparatively harmless, though some singers consider it desirable to be cautious in using them.

FOOTNOTES: 

[79] Fere, Travail et Plaisir, Chapter XIII.

[80] Travail et Plaisir, p. 175.  It is doubtless true of the effects of odors on the sexual sphere.  Fere records the case of a neurasthenic lady whose sexual coldness toward her husband only disappeared after the abandonment of a perfume (in which heliotrope was apparently the chief constituent) she had been accustomed to use in excessive amounts.

[81] It is perhaps significant that many colors are especially liable to produce skin disorders, especially urticaria; a number of cases have been recorded by Joal, Journal de Medecine, July 10, 1899.

[82] Layet, art.  “Vanillisme,” Dictionnaire Encyclopedique des Sciences Medicales; cf.  Audeoud, Revue Medicale de la Suisse Romande, October 20, 1899, summarized in the British Medical Journal, 1899.

[83] E. Tardif, Les Odeurs et Parfums, Chapter III.

[84] Fere, Societe de Biologie, March 28, 1896.

VI.

The Place of Smell in Human Sexual Selections—­It has given Place to the Predominance of Vision largely because in Civilized Man it Fails to Act at a Distance—­It still Plays a Part by Contributing to the Sympathies or the Antipathies of Intimate Contact.

When we survey comprehensively the extensive field we have here rapidly traversed, it seems not impossible to gain a fairly accurate view of the special place which olfactory sensations play in human sexual selection.  The special peculiarity of this group of sensations in man, and that which gives them an importance they would not otherwise possess, is due to the fact that we here witness the decadence of a sense which in man’s remote ancestors was the very chiefest avenue of sexual allurement.  In man, even the most primitive man,—­to some degree even in the apes,—­it has declined in importance to give place to the predominance of vision.[85] Yet, at that lower threshold of acuity at which it persists in man it still bathes us in a more or less constant atmosphere of odors, which perpetually move us to sympathy or to antipathy, and which in their finer manifestations we do not neglect, but even cultivate with the increase of our civilization.