The Northern nations of ancient Europe, Grimm tells us, believed that hell was a place of burning pitch, whence arose an intolerable stench. Our English word “smell” is obviously related to a German dialect word for hell—_smela_—which in turn is itself akin to the Bohemian _smola_, resin or pitch. The Christian “hell” was thus the lineal descendant of the subterranean “Hades” of the pagans, and what its stench was like may be gathered from that of the noxious fumes that rise out of clefts in volcanic rocks, such fumes, we may suppose, as in earlier days threw the Oracle at Delphi into her prophetic trances. (Some authorities, however, say that it was the smoke of burning bay-leaves that the Oracle inhaled.) The offensive odour of hell adheres to all the devils right down to modern times. In the Middle Ages you could always tell the Evil One by his sulphurous stink, but, unfortunately for the tempted, it was not usually observed until after his departure. But evil odours not only attended the devil himself: they were also generated by the sins. For St. Joseph of Copertino, “seeing beneath the envelope of the body,” was able to recognise the sins of the flesh by their odour. And St. Paconi, so it was said, could even smell out heretics in his day, presumably in the same way as witches are now discovered in Africa. Moreover, as the devil and his minions are attended with a vile smell, the odour of their infernal home, so naturally they detest what we call sweet and aromatic perfumes and are repelled by them, as the following tale from Sinistrari of Ameno shows. I give it _verbatim_ as it appears in Sax Rohmer’s “Romance of Sorcery”: “In a certain monastery of holy nuns there lived as a boarder a young maiden of noble birth who was tempted by an Incubus, that appeared to her by day and by night, and with the most earnest entreaties, the manners of a most passionate lover, incessantly incited her to sin; but she, supported by the grace of God and the frequent use of the Sacraments, stoutly resisted the temptation. But all her devotions, fasts, and vows notwithstanding, despite the exorcisms, the blessings, the injunctions showered by exorcists on the Incubus that he should desist from molesting her, in spite of the crowd of relics and other holy objects collected in the maiden’s room, of the lighted candles kept burning there all night, the Incubus none the less persisted in appearing to her as usual in the shape of a very handsome young man. “At last among other learned men whose advice had been taken on the subject was a very erudite Theologian, who, observing that the maiden was of a thoroughly phlegmatic temperament, surmised that the Incubus was an aqueous demon (there are in fact, as is testified by Guaccius, igneous, aerial, phlegmatic, earthly, subterranean demons, who avoid the light of day) and prescribed an uninterrupted fumigation of the room.