The seduction of the voice has some of the characteristics attributed to ancient sorcery; it surprises, fascinates and conquers us, and we are unable to discover the cause of such a storm roused by a few sounds, a few words. We feel ourselves almost humiliated at being vanquished without a battle, carried off without our consent; and the fascination of a voice seems to us the work of a witch. More than once we have resisted the seductions of sight, the violence of touch; but the voice conquers us, delivers us, bound, hand and foot, into the arms of a mysterious power which demands from us the blindest submission, against which rebellion is impossible. And this influence of the voice lasts a long time, is never forgotten, often survives love itself. After long years of silence, indifference, contempt, the wind carries to us the sound of a voice; and we feel ourselves disturbed, surprised, reconquered, as in the first day of our love. Hearing will cast its fishing-line into the deepest waters of our affection; and more than one love has been resuscitated miraculously from the coldest ashes by a dear voice which we had, perhaps, long since forgotten. Love has many mysterious relations to the olfactory sense. In the animal world perfumes are often the more direct and powerful instigators in amorous struggles; and even before the female has seen the companion by whom she desires to be conquered, the wings of the wind have carried to her nostrils a perfume that inebriates and fills her with voluptuousness. This sense may be a powerful excitant in inferior races, or in the lower type of men of high races, but it exercises, in love, a powerful influence even in the most refined natures, by means of perfumes which we have conquered from nature and which, by the omnipotence of chemistry, we know how to reproduce without having recourse to the power of life. We have brought into our power the essence of every petal, the perfume of every calyx, of every leaf, of every bark, the repugnant smell of many enamored animals, and, with impudent art, mixing the odors of flowers with exciting aromas, we have concentrated in a few drops of essence so much olfactory voluptuousness as warm spring could hardly concentrate in a flowering meadow or in a tropical forest. Now the deep and intense voluptuousness of perfumes is the daughter of a remote atavism which makes us susceptible of the sexual exhalations of many living beings and, solely for this reason, no sense has more intimate ties with animal voluptuousness than smell.