than I now can. The spring came early, and once out of doors the
swiftly-flitting hours of sensory acuteness brought to me on every
breeze nameless odors which have no being to the common sense,--a sweet,
faint confusion of scents, some slight, some too intense,--a gamut of
odors. Usually I have an imperfect capacity to apprehend smells, unless
they are very positive, and it was a curious lesson to learn how intense
for the time a not perfect function may become. Recent researches have
shown that a drug like mercaptan may be used to test the limit of
olfactory appreciation. We have thus come to know that the capacity to
perceive an odor is more delicate than our ability to recognize light.
Probably it is an inconceivable delicacy of the sense of smell more than
anything else which enables animals to find their way in the manner
which seems to us so utterly mysterious. Yet, even in human beings, and
not alone in a fortunate convalescence, do we see startling
illustrations of the possibilities of this form of sensorial acuteness.
I know of a woman who can by the smell at once tell the worn gloves of
the several people with whom she is most familiar, and I also recall a
clever choreic lad of fourteen who could distinguish when blindfold the
handkerchiefs of his mother, his father, or himself, just after they
have been washed and ironed. This test has been made over and over, to
my satisfaction and surprise.

If a man could possess in the highest degree and in combination all of
the possible extremes of sensory appreciativeness seen in disease, in
hysteria, and in the hypnotic state, we should have a being of
extraordinary capacities for observation. Taylor, in his "Physical
Theory of Another World," a singular and half-forgotten book, has set
this forth as conceivable of the beings of a world to come, and dwelt
upon it in an ingenious and interesting way. For a long time even the
inhalation of tobacco-smoke from a friend's cigar disturbed my heart,