Editorial note — DEFINITE DREADS

[Footnote 48: This question of the varying acuteness of smell in different people is very interesting to the psychotherapeutist for diagnosis and therapy. We have a number of striking cases of very acute olfactory power. This is what might be expected since animals whose respiratory and smell apparatuses are very like our own show extreme differences. The extent to which human power to recognize odors can go is marvelous. In his "Thinking, Feeling, Doing," Prof. Scripture says: "I have a case—reported by a perfectly competent witness who lived for years with the person mentioned—of a woman in charge of a boarding school who always sorted the boys' linen after the wash by the odor alone." Personally, I have sometimes wondered whether this power, like that of feeling in the blind, could not be developed. The blind are supposed actually to bring about an evolution in their nerves of feeling. No such thing happens, however. An examination of them by means of an esthesiometer shows that their nerves are no better developed than those of other people, though they may be able to recognize much minuter differences between the "feel" of things and may be able to read raised type, which the seeing cannot. This is all due to a training of their attention to note slight differences in sensation, however, and not to improvement in the nervous apparatus. ]