Besides this formal, there is much informal training—the frequent appeal to smell in the lessons on chemistry, botany, or domestic science.
As for taste, the difficulty of keeping this sense delicate and healthy is often great, on account of the indifference of parents. It appears that no sense is more easily depraved and coarsened than is this one, and the mischief once done can hardly be undone. One authority declares that the sense of taste cannot be redeemed even a little in less than nine months—that one must have nearly three hundred meals in order to forget a sensation produced by a harmful dish (such as tinned fish drenched in vinegar), or rather in order to enjoy a good article of diet. Thus a slum child, ricketty and starving, will refuse to touch milk. Many will go hungry rather than swallow wholesome soup, and only after months will a depraved palate begin to tolerate the new food that, under natural conditions, it would have preferred from infancy. But this restoration of taste is certainly a greater triumph than the mastery of the art of spelling, and it will probably have more far-reaching results. It betokens a returning sensitiveness which will be its owner's best safeguard from degrading vices. And it is well to know that although fine taste is kept by few (Tolstoy draws
