An
animal not only receives adequate sexual excitement from olfactory
stimuli, but those stimuli often suffice to counterbalance all the
evidence of the other senses.
We may observe this very well in the case of the dog. Thus, a
young dog, well known to me, who had never had connection with a
bitch, but was always in the society of its father, once met the
latter directly after the elder dog had been with a bitch. He
immediately endeavored to behave toward the elder dog, in spite
of angry repulses, exactly as a dog behaves toward a bitch in
heat. The messages received by the sense of smell were
sufficiently urgent not only to set the sexual mechanism in
action, but to overcome the experiences of a lifetime. There is
an interesting chapter on the sense of smell in the mental life
of the dog in Giessler's _Psychologie des Geruches_, 1894,
Chapter XI, Passy (in the appendix to his memoir on olfaction,
_L'Annee Psychologique_, 1895) gives the result of some
interesting experiments as to the effects of perfume on dogs;
civet and castoreum were found to have the most powerfully
exciting effect.
The influences of smell are equally omnipotent in the sexual life
of many insects.
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