some, but not all; and only 12 per cent. could recall all or nearly all at pleasure. The odours most easy to bring back were pinks, musk, violet, heliotrope, carbolic acid, the smell of the country, grass, and so on. Many, as in my own case, have to evoke the visual image first.
But if the recollection of a scene can only with difficulty, or not at all, revive the sensation of an odour, the converse is most startlingly true. For odours have an extraordinary, an inexplicable, power of spontaneously and suddenly presenting a forgotten scene to the mind, and with such nearness to reality that we are translated bodily, being caught up by the spirit, as it were, like St. Philip, to be placed once more in the midst of the old past life, where we live the moment over again with the full chord of its emotions vibrating our soul and startling our consciousness. There are, it is true, certain sounds which wield the same miraculous power over our being—
“…the chime familiar of a bell
Last heard at sea, but now on homely ground,
Can, with the sprites that deep in memory dwell,
Create the world anew with stroke of sound,
Transforming daisied fields to foaming seas,
And changing vales from summer calm serene
To warring tides round wintry Hebrides
That fling and toss in wat’ry hillocks green”—
but I do not think they operate in this way so frequently as do smells.
