as gifts worthy the acceptance of a king or a god. These products of the
Orient were equally in demand by the toilet and the temple. The
unctorium was an adjunct of the Roman bathroom. Kings had to be greased
and fumigated before they were thought fit to sit upon a throne. There
was a theory, not yet altogether extinct, that medicines brought from a
distance were most efficacious, especially if, besides being expensive,
they tasted bad like myrrh or smelled bad like asafetida. And if these
failed to save the princely patient he was embalmed in aromatics or, as
we now call them, antiseptics of the benzene series.

Today, as always, men are willing to pay high for the titillation of the
senses of smell and taste. The African savage will trade off an ivory
tusk for a piece of soap reeking with synthetic musk. The clubman will
pay $10 for a bottle of wine which consists mostly of water with about
ten per cent. of alcohol, worth a cent or two, but contains an
unweighable amount of the "bouquet" that can only be produced on the
sunny slopes of Champagne or in the valley of the Rhine. But very likely
the reader is quite as extravagant, for when one buys the natural violet
perfumery he is paying at the rate of more than $10,000 a pound for the
odoriferous oil it contains; the rest is mere water and alcohol. But you
would not want the pure undiluted oil if you could get it, for it is
unendurable. A single whiff of it paralyzes your sense of smell for a
time just as a loud noise deafens you.

Of the five senses, three are physical and two chemical. By touch we
discern pressures and surface textures. By hearing we receive
impressions of certain air waves and by sight of certain ether waves.
But smell and taste lead us to the heart of the molecule and enable us
to tell how the atoms are put together. These twin senses stand like
sentries at the portals of the body, where they closely scrutinize