to be read to an excited populace, since a squirt of perfume will suffice to allay their fury. The comic lecturer or charity-sermon preacher may assure themselves of the sympathy of his audiences quite apart from the matter of their discourse. Science will have new fields opened to it, and humanity take a new lease of its pleasures. The nose, hitherto held of little more account than the chin, will supersede all the other features, and, like Cinderella, rise from the kitchen ashes to palace dignities, developing under the Darwinian theory into proboscidian dimensions of extraordinary acuteness. The policeman will need no evidence but that of his nose to detect the thief, actual or potential, and the judge, unhampered by jury, counsel or witnesses, will summarily dispense a nasal justice. Diplomacy will be purged of its obscurities, and statesmen live in a perpetual palace of truth. Conscious of each other’s detective organs, men will speak of their fellows honestly, and hypocrisy will cease from society. How will war or crime be able to thrive when the first symptom of ill-temper in a sovereign or of ambition in a minister can be quenched at the will of any individual ratepayer? And thus a universal peace will settle upon a sniffing world.
