That the effect of odour upon the mind is largely concealed is further illustrated by the curious fact that our native language does not possess a terminology descriptive of smells. We never name an odour; we only say it has a “smell like” something or another. As a matter of fact, the same remark was made regarding French by P. P. Poncelet as long ago as 1755. In this defect smell is unique among the senses. Even the sense that governs equilibration, of which the consciousness in normal conditions is never aware, has furnished us with “giddy” and “dizzy.” Vision is represented by hundreds of words. We have, for instance, names not only for the primary colours red, yellow, and blue, but also for many of their combinations. (In these remarks we are not including the modern names given to the many shades of the synthetic colours.) If we take red as an example, we find scarlet, crimson, vermilion, and pink. This colour, indeed, is ranked above all others in the vulgar tongue as having shades, doubtless because red, being the colour of blood and so of danger, always makes a strong appeal to the mind, an appeal which, among the responses, has led to special names being given to four of its tones. The sense of hearing again, upon which speech is wholly dependent, has given rise to a multitude of words, many of them closely imitative of the sound, or onomatopoetic, with which words English, like the related German, is richly adorned. Touch also has produced a number of descriptive epithets—“hot,” “cold,” “wet,” “dry,” “moist,” “clammy,” “rough,” “smooth,” as well as those like “heavy” and “light,” from the deep tactile sensibility. Even taste has its vocabulary, a complete one, as it happens, since each of the four varieties of taste has its own appropriate name—“sweet,” “sour,” “bitter,” and “salt.” But smell is speechless. We can truthfully say that in our native English language there is not a single word characterising any one of all the myriad odours in the world. No doubt there are many words that we do apply to smells. But they are either borrowed from the vocabulary of one of the other senses, in order to describe a state of mind induced by the smell, or else they originate from some known odoriferous object. Thus in the opening paragraph of this book we encountered a large number of olfactory words. But they are all vague; some applying to pleasant, some to unpleasant, odours. Many of them are very expressive, for disgust begets strong language. But although our olfactory vocabulary may be forceful, it is not discriminative. In other words, it is an emotional, not an intellectual, vocabulary. These considerations will become more obvious as we deal with olfactory epithets in detail.