lend me a hand with those trees next autumn after all."




ON THE WORLD WE LIVE IN


In one of those charming articles which he writes in _The New Statesman_,
Mr. J. Arthur Thomson tells of the wonderful world of odours to which we
are largely strangers. No doubt in an earlier existence we relied much more
upon our noses for our food, our safety, and all that concerned us, and had
a highly developed faculty of smell which has become more or less
atrophied.

Fee, fie, fo, fum,
I smell the blood of an Englishman,

said the Giant in the story. But that was long ago. If we were left to the
testimony of our noses we could not tell an Englishman from a hippopotamus.
To the bee, on the other hand, with its two or three thousand olfactory
pores, the world is primarily a world of smell. If we could question that
wonderful creature we should find that it thought and talked of nothing but
the odours of the field. We should find that it had a range of experience
in that realm beyond our wildest imaginings. We should find that there are
more smells in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy.

We talk of the world as if our sensations were the sum total of experience.
But the truth is that there is an infinity of worlds outside our
comprehension, worlds of vision and hearing and smell that are beyond our