Passy
goes so far as to state that he has "never met with any object that is
really inodorous when one pays attention to it, not even excepting glass,"
and, though we can scarcely accept this statement absolutely,--especially
in view of the careful experiments of Ayrton, which show that, contrary
to a common belief, metals when perfectly clean and free from traces of
contact with the skin or with salt solutions have no smell,--odor is still
extremely widely diffused. This is especially the case in hot countries,
and the experiments of the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition on the
sense of smell of the Papuans were considerably impeded by the fact that
at Torres Straits everything, even water, seemed to have a smell. Savages
are often accused more or less justly of indifference to bad odors. They
are very often, however, keenly alive to the significance of smells and
their varieties, though it does not appear that the sense of smell is
notably more developed in savage than in civilized peoples. Odors also
continue to play a part in the emotional life of man, more especially in
hot countries. Nevertheless both in practical life and in emotional life,
in science and in art, smell is, at the best, under normal conditions,
merely an auxiliary.
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