extremely widely diffused. This is especially the case in hot countries,
and the experiments of the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition on the
sense of smell of the Papuans were considerably impeded by the fact that
at Torres Straits everything, even water, seemed to have a smell. Savages
are often accused more or less justly of indifference to bad odors. They
are very often, however, keenly alive to the significance of smells and
their varieties, though it does not appear that the sense of smell is
notably more developed in savage than in civilized peoples. Odors also
continue to play a part in the emotional life of man, more especially in
hot countries. Nevertheless both in practical life and in emotional life,
in science and in art, smell is, at the best, under normal conditions,
merely an auxiliary. If the sense of smell were abolished altogether the
life of mankind would continue as before, with little or no sensible
modification, though the pleasures of life, and especially of eating and
drinking, would be to some extent diminished.

In New Ireland, Duffield remarks (_Journal of the Anthropological
Institute_, 1886, p. 118), the natives have a very keen sense of
smell; unusual odors are repulsive to them, and "carbolic acid
drove them wild."

The New Caledonians, according to Foley (_Bulletin de la Société
d'Anthropologie_, November 6, 1879), only like the smells of meat
and fish which are becoming "high," like _popoya_, which smells
of fowl manure, and _kava_, of rotten eggs. Fruits and vegetables
which are beginning to go bad seem the best to them, while the
fresh and natural odors which we prefer seem merely to say to
them: "We are not yet eatable." (A taste for putrefying food,
common among savages, by no means necessarily involves a distaste
for agreeable scents, and even among Europeans there is a