We do not attach enough importance to the discrimination of odours, whether as a safeguard to health, or as a source of pleasure. Half the people one knows have nostrils which register no difference between the atmosphere of a large, and so-called “airy,” room, whose windows are never opened, and that of a room in which a through current of air is arranged for at frequent intervals: and yet health depends largely on a delicate perception as to the purity of the atmosphere. The odours which result in diphtheria or typhoid are perceptible, however faint, and a nose trained to detect the faintest malodorous particles in food, clothing, or dwelling, is a panoply against disease to the possessor. Then, odours enter more readily than other sense perceptions into those-- “Sensations sweet, Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart,” which add so much to the sum of our happiness, because they unite themselves so readily with our purely incorporeal joys by links of association. “I never smell woodruff without being reminded----” is the sort of thing we hear and say continually, but we do not trouble ourselves to realise that we owe a double joy to the odour of the woodruff (or it may be, alas! a reflected sorrow)--the joy of the pleasant influences about us when we pluck the flower, and the possibly more personal joy of that other time with which we associate it. Every new odour perceived is a source, if not of warning, of recurrent satisfaction or interest. We are acquainted with too few of the odours which the spring-time offers. Only this spring the present writer learned two peculiarly delightful odours quite new to her, that of young larch twigs, which have much the same kind and degree of fragrance as the flower of the syringa, and the pleasant musky aroma of a box-hedge. Children should be trained, for example, to shut their eyes when they come into the drawing-room and discover by their nostrils what odorous flowers are present, should discriminate the garden odours let loose by a shower of rain:-- “Houses and rooms are full of perfumes, the shelves are crowded with perfumes, I breathe the fragrance myself and know it and like it. * * * * * The atmosphere is not a perfume, it has no taste of the distillation, it is odourless, It is for my mouth for ever, I am in love with it. * * * * * The sniff of green leaves, and dry leaves, and of the shore, and dark-coloured sea-rocks, and of hay in the barn.” --The American poet has, perhaps, done more than any other to express the pleasure to be found in odours. This is one direction in which much remains to be done; we have not yet arrived even at a scale of odours, as of sound and of colour.