on to the
excessive stimulation of the sexual sphere; so that the Christian ascetics
were entirely justified, on their premises, in fighting against the bath
and in directly or indirectly fostering a cult of physical uncleanliness.
While, however, in the past there has clearly been a general tendency for
the cult of physical purity to be associated with moral licentiousness,
and there are sufficient grounds for such an association, it is important
to remember that it is not an inevitable and fatal association; a
scrupulously clean person is by no means necessarily impelled to
licentiousness; a physically unclean person is by no means necessarily
morally pure. When we have eliminated certain forms of the bath which must
be regarded as luxuries rather than hygienic necessities, though they
occasionally possess therapeutic virtues, we have eliminated the most
violent appeals of the bath to the sexual impulse. So imperative are the
demands of physical purity now becoming, in general opinion, that such
small risks to moral purity as may still remain are constantly and wisely
disregarded, and the immoral traditions of the bath now, for the most
part, belong to the past.

SMELL.

I.

The Primitiveness of Smell--The Anatomical Seat of the Olfactory
Centres--Predominance of Smell among the Lower Mammals--Its Diminished
Importance in Man--The Attention Paid to Odors by Savages.

The first more highly organized sense to arise on the diffused tactile
sensitivity of the skin is, in most cases, without doubt that of smell. At
first, indeed, olfactory sensibility is not clearly differentiated from
general tactile sensibility; the pit of thickened and ciliated epithelium
or the highly mobile antennae which in many lower animals are sensitive to
odorous stimuli are also extremely sensitive to tactile stimuli; this is,
for instance, the case with the snail, in whom at the same time olfactive
sensibility seems to be spread over the whole body.[24] The sense of smell
is gradually specialized, and when taste also begins to develop a kind of
chemical sense is constituted. The organ of smell, however, speedily
begins to rise in importance as we ascend the zooelogical scale. In the
lower vertebrates, when they began to adopt a life on dry land, the sense
of smell seems to have been that part of their sensory equipment which
proved most useful under the new conditions, and it developed with
astonishing rapidity. Edinger finds that