In the medical, chemical, and alimentary families these senses were trained to a pitch that seemed to me marvellous. By either smell or taste a member of these families could tell the constituent elements of any compound. A medical sage, if a man, could distinguish by the faint odour that marked each human body whether it was losing energy or expending it, making progress or decaying; if a woman, the sage, in order to make this decision, had as a rule to bring in the help of taste; for it had remained from the primitive animal stage of man’s development one of the differentiating marks of sex that the male had more energy of smell, the female more energy of taste; now that they had so spiritualised their senses, perfumes formed the quickest stimulus of the masculine imagination and flavours of the feminine. At the food vats it was always the Limanoran women who superintended the flavouring of any compound; whilst it was the men who had most to do with medicating the atmospheres of the chambers, and men presided in the chemical laboratories. The historical origin of this distinction, they thought, was on the one hand the development of the acuteness of smell in male animals at rutting time, and on the other the power in dams of recognising their own offspring by licking it with the tongue. And it was a well-known maxim in their medical families that every individual had a distinctive odour and taste. They could tell one man from another in the dark, and even at a considerable distance; and to touch him with the tongue was to make assurance doubly sure. The kissing that was so common in the West as a symbol of friendship and love, like the rubbing of noses amongst less civilised peoples, had as its origin and basis the recognition of the individual by the taste or smell. They did not need so close or material an investigation of the individual to have pleasant memories of friendship aroused. Their methods and symbols of companionship and love had become more and more spiritual with the passion itself.