Читать книгу Aromatics and the Soul: A Study of Smells онлайн

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Nay more! This West London efflorescence does not lie blooming alone. It is by no means the last rose of summer. On the east side of the great city, another, a rival upas-tree, spreads its nauseating blight. This is a mess that, oozing from a soap factory near Stratford-atte-Bow, envelops in its oleaginous cloud several hundred yards of the main line of the Great Eastern Railway. And the world we live in is so arranged that the trains, particularly in summer, are held up by signal for several minutes in this neighbourhood, so that, as the greasy slabs of decomposing fats slump in at the open carriage windows, an early opportunity is afforded to our Continental visitors of becoming acquainted with the purifying properties of English soap.

I am blushing now for what I have been saying about Ireland, Cologne, Lucerne, France, and even the East.

This last instance, however, opens up a large subject, that, namely, of malodorous industries. Of these there is a great number, too great indeed for me to do more than make a passing allusion to them. The proximity of evil-smelling works and factories to human habitations is, as a matter of fact, prohibited by the Public Health Acts, but it is naturally impossible to remove them entirely from the knowledge of mankind inasmuch as the workers frequently carry the atmosphere about with them. Fortunately for them, but unfortunately for us, by reason of the rapid exhaustion of the olfactory sense (which we are about to deal with in the following section), they are, for the most part, not incommoded by the objectionable airs they work in.