e less
said about the origin of these three animal perfumes the better.
Fortunately they are becoming too expensive to use and are being
displaced by synthetic products more agreeable to a refined imagination.
The musk deer may now be saved from extinction since we can make
tri-nitro-butyl-xylene from coal tar. This synthetic musk passes muster
to human nostrils, but a cat will turn up her nose at it. The synthetic
musk is not only much cheaper than the natural, but a dozen times as
strong, or let us say, goes a dozen times as far, for nobody wants it
any stronger.

Such powerful scents as these are only pleasant when highly diluted, yet
they are, as we have seen, essential ingredients of the finest perfumes.
For instance, the natural oil of jasmine and other flowers contain
traces of indols and skatols which have most disgusting odors. Though
our olfactory organs cannot detect their presence yet we perceive their
absence so they have to be put into the artificial perfume. Just so a
brief but violent discord in a piece of music or a glaring color
contrast in a painting may be necessary to the harmony of the whole.

It is absurd to object to "artificial" perfumes, for practically all
perfumes now sold are artificial in the sense of being compounded by the
art of the perfumer and whether the materials he uses are derived from
the flowers of yesteryear or of Carboniferous Era is nobody's business
but his. And he does not tell. The materials can be purchased in the
open market. Various recipes can be found in the books. But every famous
perfumer guards well the secret of his formulas and hands it as a legacy
to his posterity. The ancient Roman family of Frangipani has been made
immortal by one such hereditary recipe. The Farina family still claims
to have the exclusive knowledge of how to make Eau de Cologne. This
famous perfume was first compounded by an Italian, Giovanni Maria
Farina, who came to Cologne in 1709. It soon became fashionable and was
for a time the only scent allowed at some of the German courts. The
various published recipes contain from six to a dozen ingredients,
chiefly the oils of neroli, rosemary, bergamot, lemon and lavender
dissolved in very pure alcohol and allowed to age like wine. The
invention, in 1895, of artificial neroli (orange flowers) has improved
the product.

French perfumery, like the German, had its origin in Italy, when
Catherine de' Medici came to Paris as the bride of Henri II. Sh