pices, drugs and
gems. And why these rather than what now constitutes the bulk of oversea
and overland commerce? Because they were precious, portable and
imperishable. If the merchant got back safe after a year or two with a
little flask of otto of roses, a package of camphor and a few pearls
concealed in his garments his fortune was made. If a single ship of the
argosy sent out from Lisbon came back with a load of sandalwood, indigo
or nutmeg it was regarded as a successful venture. You know from reading
the Bible, or if not that, from your reading of Arabian Nights, that a
few grains of frankincense or a few drops of perfumed oil were regarded
as gifts worthy the acceptance of a king or a god. These products of the
Orient were equally in demand by the toilet and the temple. The
unctorium was an adjunct of the Roman bathroom. Kings had to be greased
and fumigated before they were thought fit to sit upon a throne. There
was a theory, not yet altogether extinct, that medicines brought from a
distance were most efficacious, especially if, besides being expensive,
they tasted bad like myrrh or smelled bad like asafetida. And if these
failed to save the princely patient he was embalmed in aromatics or, as
we now call them, antiseptics of the benzene series.

Today, as always, men are willing to pay high for the titillation of the
senses of smell and taste. The African savage will trade off an ivory
tusk for a piece of soap reeking with synthetic musk. The clubman will
pay $10 for a bottle of wine which consists mostly of water with about
ten per cent. of alcohol, worth a cent or two, but contains an
unweighable amount of the "bouquet" that can only be produced on the
sunny slopes of Champagne or in the valley of the Rhine. But very likely
the reader is quite as extravagant, for when one buys the natural violet
perfumery he is paying at the rate of more than $10,000 a pound for the
odoriferous oil it contains; the rest is mere water and alcohol. But you
would not want the pure undiluted oil if you could get it, for it is
unendurable. A single whiff of it paralyzes your sense of smell for a
time just as a loud noise deafens you.

Of the five senses, three are physical and two chemical. By touch we
discern pressures and surface textures. By hearing we receive
impressions of certain air waves and by sight of certain ether waves.
But smell and taste lead us to the heart of the molecule and enable us
to tell how the atoms are pu