aunts. In the same
way elephants emit a musky odor from their facial glands during the
rutting season. The odor of the musk-duck is chiefly confined to the
breeding season.[61] The musky odor of the negress is said to be
heightened during sexual excitement.

The predominance of musk as a sexual odor is associated with the fact that
its actual nervous influence, apart from the presence of sexual
association, is very considerable. Fere found it to be a powerful muscular
stimulant. In former times musk enjoyed a high reputation as a cardiac
stimulant; it fell into disuse, but in recent years its use in asthenic
states has been revived, and excellent results, it has been claimed, have
followed its administration in cases of collapse from Asiatic cholera. For
sexual torpor in women it still has (like vanilla and sandal) a certain
degree of reputation, though it is not often used, and some of the old
Arabian physicians (especially Avicenna) recommended it, with castoreum
and myrrh, for amenorrhoea. Its powerful action is indicated by the
experience of Esquirol, who stated that he had seen cases in which sensory
stimulation by musk in women during lactation had produced mania. It has
always had the reputation, more especially in the Mohammedan East, of
being a sexual stimulant to men; "the noblest of perfumes," it is called
in _El Ktab_, "and that which most provokes to venery."

It is doubtless a fact significant of the special sexual effects of musk
that, as Laycock remarked, in cases of special idiosyncrasy to odors, musk
appears to be that odor which is most liked or disliked. Thus, the old
English physician Whytt remarked that "several delicate women who could
easily bear the stronger smell of tobacco have been thrown into fits by
musk, ambergris, or a pale rose."[62] It may be remarked that in the
_Perfumed Garden of Sheik Nefzaoui_ it is stated that it is by their
sexual effects that perfumes tend to throw women into a kind of swoon, and
Lucretius remarks that a woman who smells castoreum, another animal sexual
perfume, at the time of her menstrual period may swoon.[63]

Not only is musk the most cherished perfume of the Islamic world, and the
special favorite of the Prophet himself, who greatly delighted in perfumes
("I love your world," he is reported to have said in old age, "for its
women and its perfumes"),[64] it is the only perfume generally used by the
women of a land in which the refinements of life have been