hich olfactory
perceptions have proved potent in love, we shall nearly always find that
they have been experienced under circumstances favorable for the
occurrence of tumescence. When this is not the case we may reasonably
suspect the presence of some degree of perversion.

In the oft-quoted case of the Austrian peasant who found that he
was aided in seducing young women by dancing with them and then
wiping their faces with a handkerchief he had kept in his armpit,
we may doubtless regard the preliminary excitement of the dance
as an essential factor in the influence produced.

In the same way, I am acquainted with the ease of a lady not
usually sensitive to simple body odors (though affected by
perfumes and flowers) who on one occasion, when already in a
state of sexual erethism, was highly excited when perceiving the
odor of her lover's axilla.

The same influence of preliminary excitement may be seen in
another instance known to me, that of a gentlemen who when
traveling abroad fell in with three charming young ladies during
a long railway journey. He was conscious of a pleasurable
excitement caused by the prolonged intimacy of the journey, but
this only became definitely sexual when the youngest of the
ladies, stretching before him to look out of the window and
holding on to the rack above, accidentally brought her axilla
into close proximity with his face, whereupon erection was
caused, although he himself regards personal odors, at all events
when emanating from strangers, as indifferent or repulsive.

A medical correspondent, referring to the fact that with many men
(indeed women also) sexual excitement occurs after dancing for a
considerable time, remarks that he considers the odor of the
woman's sweat is here a considerable factor.

The characteristics of olfaction which our investigation has so far
revealed have not, on the whole, been favorable to the influence of
personal odors as a sexual attraction in civilized men. It is a primitive
sense which had its flowering time before men arose; it is a comparatively
unaesthetic sense; it is a somewhat obtuse sense which among Europeans is
usually incapable of perceiving the odor of the "human flower"--to use
Goethe's phrase--except on very close contact, and on this account, and on
account of the fact that it is a predominantly emotional sense, personal
odors i