If this is not true, you evidently need lessons in sociability. With most people it is true. Eye, nose, tongue have changed not. Yet the meal looks better, smells better, tastes better. Is this due to imagination? Is there not, rather, a mutuality of ministration among the senses which requires the inspiration of friends to bring it fully out? A good eye, a good nose and a good tongue make a trinity of dining felicity. Add, then, a good heart and a pleasantly active soul, and the function of Will-power in the realm of vision, hearing and taste is discovered.

Exercise No. 8. While dining with friends, make the exercises of this chapter the subject of conversation and experiment so far as consistent with the business in hand, namely, dining in the most agreeable manner.

Exercise No. 9. It is a human privilege to put the soul into bodily sensations, or to withdraw it therefrom. In the one case the word is attention, in the other case it is abstraction. The following exercise deals with abstraction.

Secure the sensation of any taste or any smell. Now resolutely try to recall from memory some other different sensation so vividly as to banish the first from mind. For example: smell of a rose, and then think strongly of the odor of onions. You must entirely forget the flower while thinking of the vegetable. Or, taste a little sugar, and then put the sensation out of mind by recalling the memory of wormwood. Or the senses may, as it were, be crossed. Smell of a pink and banish the sensation by strong thought of the taste of pepper. Or taste alum and think about the smell of ammonia so keenly as to banish the first sen sation. Repeat these exercises every day for ten days, with rest, and on the tenth day note improvement.

After all, abstraction is only another name for attention-withdrawn from one quarter by being massed upon another. Whoever attends intelligently and masterfully to eye, nose, tongue, has either new worlds of pleasure or new guards against displeasure. Above all, has this person Will. Attention cultivated involves Will always pres

ent.

THE FRAGRANCE.

Across the fields of time and space
Old flowery perfumes drift and beat
Upon my spirit's eager face

With waves of subtle, sensuous grace,
Heavily sweet.

A farmhouse dooryard all aglow
In colors loved by simple eyes,
Restores dear memory's passing show,
Which life a-now can never know,
Of fields and skies.

So near to sense is life divine,

So quick the soul to pierce the veil:

A lilac's fragrance is like wine,
And, as I quaff, the joys are mine
Of youth's lost trail.

The Nature-World, a mighty rose

Borne on the tree of Chaos vast, Into my soul its nerve-life throws, Till I am all that round me growsMade one at last.

-THE AUTHOR.

66

CHAPTER XII.

EXERCISES IN SMELL.

T is stated in Mr. Stewart's account of James
Mitchell, who was deaf, sightless and speech-

less, and, of course, strongly induced by his unfortunate situation to make much use of the sense we are considering, that his smell would immediately and invariably inform him of the presence of a stranger, and direct to the place where he might be; and it is repeatedly asserted that this sense had become in him extremely acute.' It is related,' says Dr. Abercrombie,' of the late Dr. Moyse, the well-known blind philosopher, that he could distinguish a black dress on his friends by its smell."" -Professor Thomas C. Upham.

THEORY OF THIS CHAPTER.

Keenness of attention through discrimination in the sense of smell;

Persistently willed attention a feeder of Will;

A neglected sense cultivated and fullness and power of mind increased.

"In all ages of the world," Dr. William Matthews has said, "a liberal allowance of proboscis has been admired, while a niggardly one has been held in contempt. The Romans liked a large nose, like Julius Cæsar's; and it is a significant fact that the same word in Latin, Nasutus, means having a large nose, and acute or sagacious. All their distinguished men had snuff-taking organs not to be

sneezed at." "In modern days, large noses have been not less coveted and esteemed than in the ancient. 'Give me,' said Napoleon, 'a man with a large allowance of nose. In my observations of men I have almost invariably found a long nose and a long head go together.'"

PRELIMINARY.

"The faculty of scent may be cultivated like all other faculties, as is proven by blood-hounds and breeds of dogs which have been specially trained in this direction until it becomes an hereditary faculty. Those who deal in teas, coffees, perfumes, wine and butter, often cultivate their powers to a wonderful degree in their especial lines, but with the majority of people it is the least cultivated of the senses, although Dr. O. W. Holmes thinks it the one which most powerfully appeals to memory."

The sense of smell, it would seem, then, has been greatly neglected, as is seen in the fact that the names of odors are almost entirely artificial or derived from association. That it may be trained may be proved by any druggist or manufacturer of perfumes. The druggist does not recognize the "smell" of his own shop, but he perceives by the nose when he enters that of another. Always must he discriminate among odors in his business. The perfumist lives on the acuteness of his olfactory nerves. The glue-maker and soap-refiner exist in spite of their pursuits.

"We have little scientific knowledge of odors," says Calkins. "Even our names for them are borrowed, usually from the objects to which we chance to refer them, and occasionally even from their affective accompaniments. Thus we know some odors only vaguely as good or bad, that is, pleasant or unpleasant, and at the best we can say nothing more definite than 'heliotrope fragrance' or 'ker