hat neuropathic family, there is extreme
sensitiveness to the smell of a woman, which is frequently the
most obvious thing to him about her. He has seldom known a woman
whose natural perfume entirely suits him, and his olfactory
impressions have frequently been the immediate cause of a rupture
of relationships.

It was formerly discussed whether strong personal odor
constituted adequate ground for divorce. Hagen, who brings
forward references on this point (_Sexuelle Osphresiologie_, pp.
75-83), considers that the body odors are normally and naturally
repulsive because they are closely associated with the capryl
group of odors, which are those of many of the excretions.

Olfactory antipathies are, however, often strictly subordinated
to the individual's general emotional attitude toward the object
from which they emanate. This is illustrated in the case, known
to me, of a man who on a hot day entering a steamboat with a
woman to whom he was attached seated himself between her and a
man, a stranger. He soon became conscious of an axillary odor
which he concluded to come from the man and which he felt as
disagreeable. But a little later he realized that it proceeded
from his own companion, and with this discovery the odor at once
lost its disagreeable character.

In this respect a personal odor resembles a personal touch. Two
intimate touches of the hand, though of precisely similar
physical quality, may in their emotional effects be separated by
an immeasurable interval, in dependence on our attitude toward
the person from whom they proceed.

Personal odor, in order to make its allurement felt, and not to arouse
antipathy, must, in normal persons, have been preceded by conditions which
have inhibited the play of the antisexual instinct. A certain degree of
tumescence must already have been attained. It is even possible, when we
bear in mind the intimate sympathy between the sexual sphere and the nose,
that the olfactory organ needs to have its sensibility modified in a form
receptive to sexual messages, though such an assumption is by no means
necessary. It is when such a faint preliminary degree of tumescence has
been attained, however it may have been attained,--for the methods of
tumescence, as we know, are innumerable,--that a sympathetic personal odor
is enabled to make its appeal. If we analyze the cases in w