which attracted a great deal of attention in Germany as well as
in France; he considered that the exhalations of the feminine
body are of the first importance in sexual attraction.

Prof. A. Galopin in 1886 wrote a semiscientific book, _Le Parfum
de la Femme_, in which the sexual significance of personal odor
is developed to its fullest. He writes with enthusiasm concerning
the sweet and health-giving character of the natural perfume of a
beloved woman, and the mischief done both to health and love by
the use of artificial perfumes. "The purest marriage that can be
contracted between a man and a woman," he asserts (p. 157) "is
that engendered by olfaction and sanctioned by a common
assimilation in the brain of the animated molecules due to the
secretion and evaporation of two bodies in contact and sympathy."

In a book written during the first half of the nineteenth century
which contains various subtle observations on love we read, with
reference to the sweet odor which poets have found in the breath
of women: "In reality many women have an intoxicatingly agreeable
breath which plays no small part in the love-compelling
atmosphere which they spread around them" (_Eros oder Woerterbuch
ueber die Physiologie_, 1849, Bd. 1, p. 45).

Most of the writers on the psychology of love at this period,
however, seem to have passed over the olfactory element in sexual
attraction, regarding it probably as too unaesthetic. It receives
no emphasis either in Senancour's _De l'Amour_ or Stendhal's _De
l'Amour_ or Michelet's _L'Amour_.

The poets within recent times have frequently referred to odors,
personal and other, but the novelists have more rarely done so.
Zola and Huysmans, the two novelists who have most elaborately
and insistently developed the olfactory side of life, have dwelt
more on odors that are repulsive than on those that are
agreeable. It is therefore of interest to note that in a few
remarkable novels of recent times the attractiveness of personal
odor has been emphasized. This is notably so in Tolstoy's _War
and Peace_, in which Count Peter suddenly resolves to marry
Princess Helena after inhaling her odor at a ball. In
d'Annunzio's _Trionfo della Morte_ the seductive and consoling
odor of the beloved woman's skin is described in several
passages; thus, when Giorgio k