Now memory can nearly always be recognised as memory. There is about its representations a dulling in colour, a haziness in outline, a vagueness in detail, that serves to distinguish it from the harder, clearer pictures of the imagination. Its figures and their doings are like ghosts; through them you can see the solid furniture of to-day. But from the olfactory miracle we are now considering the effect of time, the fraying effect of time and superimposed incident, is absent. That is still fresh, still, as we might say, in process of elaboration, the manifold and complicated experiences we have undergone since its occurrence being blotted for the moment out of the mind. Curiously enough, although Ribot finds that about 60 per cent. of people experience the “spontaneous” revival of odour in memory, and so presumably are subject to this arresting phenomenon, it does not seem to have been mentioned by writers in general until about our own time. At all events, the earliest allusion I can find to it is in “Les Fleurs du Mal” of Baudelaire: “Lecteur, as-tu quelquefois respiré Avec ivresse et lente gourmandise Ce grain d’encens qui remplit une église Ou d’un sachet le musc invétéré? “Charme profond, magique, dont nous grise Dans le présent le passé restauré”.... Shortly after Baudelaire’s time Bret Harte, on the other side of the Atlantic, imported it into “The Newport Romance”: “But the smell of that subtle, sad perfume, As the spiced embalmings, they say, outlast The mummy laid in his rocky tomb, Awakes my buried past. “And I think of the passion that shook my youth, Of its aimless loves and its idle pains, And am thankful now of the certain truth That only the sweet remains.” But the most precise and definite allusion to this curious power of odours seems to have first been made by Oliver Wendell Holmes in “The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table.” Here is what he says, and it will be noted that he makes as high a claim for the power of olfaction as I have done: “Memory, imagination, old sentiments and associations, are more readily reached through the sense of SMELL than by almost any other channel.” “Phosphorus fires this train of associations in an instant; its luminous vapours with their penetrating odour throw me into a trance; it comes to me in a double sense, ‘trailing clouds of glory.’”