Psychology of sex - Total No. of Records in System :: 2032

THE BIOLOGY OF SEXSmith show, was originally little more than die receptivecenter for impressions of smell and the instrument forenabling that sense to influence the animal's behavior;and these olfactory impulses reached the cortex directlyand not by passing through the thalamus. So that, psychologically,smell occupies a unique position. It represents"the germ of all the higher psychical powers," or at allevents the cement that binds them together. In the primitivevertebrates living in the water, smell (whichis thenmore akin to taste than in Man and also more affectivethan any other sense) dominates the whole behavior andisof immense biological significance."When we reach the higher apes and Man, all this hasof an indiffer-been changed. The sense of smell, indeed, still persistsuniversally and it is also exceedingly delicate, thoughoften neglected. It is, moreover, a useful auxiliary. Savagesare often accused, more or less justly,ence to bad odors. They are often, however, keenly aliveto the significance of smells and their varieties, thoughit does not appear that the sense of smell isnotably moredeveloped in savage than in civilized peoples. Odors alsocontinue to play a part in the emotional life of man, moreespecially in hot countries.Nevertheless both in practical life and in emotionallife, in science and in art, smell is, at the best, undernormal conditions, merely an auxiliary, and itsstudy fellinto some discredit until Zwaardemaker of Utrecht restoredit to its proper position by the invention of hisolfactometer in 1888 and by the subsequent publicationof his work on the physiology of smell. A few years laterHeyninx of Brussels still further developed the subjectof olfaction, and seeking to put it on a rigid physicalbasis, he setup a spectrum, as it were, for smell, with aclassification dependent on variations of wave length.