[52] On the whole, it would appear that, while women are
not apt to be seriously affected, in the absence of any preliminary
excitation, by crude body odors, they are by no means insusceptible to the
sexual influence of olfactory impressions. It is probable, indeed, that
they are more affected, and more frequently affected, in this way, than
are men.
Edouard de Goncourt, in his novel _Cherie_--the intimate history
of a young girl, founded, he states, on much personal
observation--describes (Chapter LXXXV) the delight with which
sensuous, but chaste young girls often take in strong perfumes.
"Perfume and love," he remarks, "impart delights which are
closely allied." In an earlier chapter (XLIV) he writes of his
heroine at the age of 15: "The intimately happy emotion which the
young girl experienced in reading _Paul et Virginie_ and other
honestly amorous books she sought to make more complete and
intense and penetrating by soaking the book with scent, and the
love-story reached her senses and imagination through pages moist
with liquid perfume."
Carbini (_Archivio per l'Antropologia_, 1896, fasc. 3) in a very
thorough investigation of a large number of children, found that
the earliest osmo-gustative sensations occurred in the fourth
week in girls, the fifth week in boys; the first real and
definite olfactory sensations appeared in the fifteenth month in
girls, in the sixteenth in boys; while experiments on several
hundred children between the ages of 3 and 6 years showed the
girls slightly, but distinctly, superior to the boys.
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