carried so far
as Japan, and they received it from the Chinese.[65]

Moreover, musk is still the most popular of European perfumes. It is the
perfumes containing musk, Piesse states in his well-known book on the _Art
of Perfumery_, which sell best. It is certainly true that in its simple
form the odor of musk is not nowadays highly considered in Europe. This
fact is connected with the ever-growing refinement in accordance with
which the specific odors of the sexual regions in human beings tend to
lose their primitive attractiveness and bodily odors generally become
mingled with artificial perfumes and so disguised. But, although musk in
its simple form, and under its ancient name, has lost its hold in Europe,
it is an interesting and significant fact that it is still the perfumes
which contain musk that are the most widely popular.

Peau d'Espagne may be mentioned as a highly complex and luxurious perfume,
often the favorite scent of sensuous persons, which really owes a large
part of its potency to the presence of the crude animal sexual odors of
musk and civet. It consists of wash-leather steeped in ottos of neroli,
rose, santal, lavender, verbena, bergamot, cloves, and cinnamon,
subsequently smeared with civet and musk. It is said by some, probably
with a certain degree of truth, that Peau d'Espagne is of all perfumes
that which most nearly approaches the odor of a woman's skin; whether it
also suggests the odor of leather is not so clear.

There is, however, no doubt that the smell of leather has a curiously
stimulating sexual influence on many men and women. It is an odor which
seems to occupy an intermediate place between the natural body odors and
the artificial perfumes for which it sometimes serves as a basis; possibly
it is to this fact that its occasional sexual influence is owing, for, as
we have already seen, there is a tendency for sexual allurement to attach
to odors which are not the specific personal body odors but yet are
related to them. Moll considers, no doubt rightly, that shoe fetichism,
perhaps the most frequent of sexual fetichistic perversions, is greatly
favored, if, indeed, it does not owe its origin to, the associated odor of
the feet and of the shoes.[66] He narrates a case of shoe fetichism in a
man in which the perversion began at the age of 6; when for the first time
he wore new shoes, having previously used only the left-off shoes of his
elder brother; he felt and smelt these new shoes