. (Fere, _L'Instinct Sexuel_, 1902, p. 134.)

We not only have to recognize that in the course of evolution the specific
odors of the sexual region have sunk into the background as a source of
sexual allurements, we have further to recognize the significant fact that
even those personal odors which are chiefly liable under normal
circumstances to come occasionally within the conscious sexual sphere, and
indeed purely personal odors of all kinds, fail to exert any attraction,
but rather tend to cause antipathy, unless some degree of tumescence has
already been attained. That is to say, our olfactory experiences of the
human body approximate rather to our tactile experiences of it than to our
visual experiences. Sight is our most intellectual sense, and we trust
ourselves to it with comparative boldness without any undue dread that its
messages will hurt us by their personal intimacy; we even court its
experiences, for it is the chief organ of our curiosity, as smell is of a
dog's. But smell with us has ceased to be a leading channel of
intellectual curiosity. Personal odors do not, as vision does, give us
information that is very largely intellectual; they make an appeal that is
mainly of an intimate, emotional, imaginative character. They thus tend,
when we are in our normal condition, to arouse what James calls the
antisexual instinct.

"I cannot understand how people do not see how the senses are
connected," said Jenny Lind to J.A. Symonds (Horatio Brown, _J.A.
Symonds_, vol. i, p. 207). "What I have suffered from my sense of
smell! My youth was misery from my acuteness of sensibility."

Mantegazza discusses the strength of olfactory antipathies
(_Fisiologia dell' Odio_, p. 101), and mentions that once when
ill in Paraguay he was nursed by an Indian girl of 16, who was
fresh as a peach and extremely clean, but whose odor--"a mixture
of wild beast's lair and decayed onions"--caused nausea and
almost made him faint.

Moll (_Untersuchungen ueber die Libido Sexualis_, bd. i, p. 135)
records the case of a neuropathic man who was constantly rendered
impotent by his antipathy to personal body odors. It had very
frequently happened to him to be attracted by the face and
appearance of a girl, but at the last moment potency was
inhibited by the perception of personal odor.

In the case of a man of distinguished ability known to me,
belonging to a somew