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On the other hand, the aversion we all feel from substances like iodoform, or, what is worse, scatol, owes not the least part of its strength to the fact that both of those vile smells are very persistent. As was once said to a surgeon applying iodoform to a wound in a patient’s nose: “This patient will certainly visit you again, sir, but—it will not be to consult you!”

To this more or less rapid exhaustion of the sense is due the merciful dispensation that no one is aware of his own particular aura. We are only cognisant of odours that are strange to us. The Chinese and Japanese find the neighbourhood of Europeans highly objectionable, and we return the compliment. It is the stranger to the Island who remarks the “very ancient and fish-like smell.”

Fatigue and then exhaustion of a sense-organ, rendering it finally irresponsive to a particular stimulus, is, of course, familiar to us also in the case of vision, as the soap advertisement of our boyhood with its complementary colours taught us. Taste manifests the same phenomenon, for which reason (so he says) the cheese-taster in Scotland swallows a little whisky after each of the different samples he tries. But, curiously enough, the healthy ear is not thus dulled save by a very loud, persistent noise, and then there is the risk of permanent damage to the hearing organ. Some forms of tactile sensation, also, would seem to remain ever sensitive, for, although it may be possible to become so inured to pain as to ignore it, yet that is probably a mental act, and it is said, moreover, that men have been tortured to death by the tickling of the soles of their feet.