My most ardent desire was to work in the laboratories of the University of Berlin under Professor Helmholtz, whose monumental books on the sensations of tone and on the phenomena of sight had revealed so many secrets to the world of science. Unfortunately he was not lecturing on those subjects at that time. Moreover, reperusal of his books made me feel as if he had covered all the most interesting ground. I therefore looked about for a region in which I could do some exploring on my own account, and soon found it in the functions of the senses of smell and taste.
Concerning these two senses, the most absurdly incorrect notions were current at that time even among leaders in science. Grant Allen, known as "the St. Paul of Darwinism," voiced the current biological opinion when he wrote that with man "smell survives with difficulty as an almost functionless relic"; and Darwin himself wrote that this sense is "of extremely slight service" to man.
The king of German philosophers, Kant, who was an epicure, maintained that smell is the least important of our senses, and that it is not worth while to cultivate it. Nay, the king of epicures, Brillat-Savarin, wrote a famous book the very title of which, "Physiology of Taste," is a scientific blunder. Like everybody else, he believed in the existence of an infinite variety of tastes, and never suspected that, _with the exception of sweet, sour, salt and bitter, all our countless gastronomic delights come to us through the sense of smell_.
The French physiologist Longet and the German anatomist Henle were, so far as I could find, the only experts who had an inkling of the gastronomic importance of the sense of smell; but they did not go so far as to formulate the theory I have just expressed in italics. My experiments showed me that not only is it impossible, with the nose clasped (or closed by a cold), to tell the difference between various kinds of meats, or cheeses, or cakes, or vegetables, but also--which no one had ever pointed out--that even in the case of sweet and sour substances which do gratify the palate, _the sense of smell is much more important than the sense of taste_.
Vinegar, for example, is absolutely uninteresting unless it has a "bouquet"--the aroma of the cider, wine, or malt of which it is made. And why is it that we are willing to pay from five to twenty times as much for candy as for plain sugar? Because the sugar appeals only to the taste, whereas the candy is usually perfumed with the aroma of sarsparilla, wintergreen, vanilla, chocolate, and a hundred other flavoring ingredients the fragrance of which we enjoy by _exhaling through the nose while eating it_.