diagnosis, the professor argues, in a lecture which he has given to the world on this fascinating subject, that if different scents express different traits of character, each trait in turn can be separately affected by a particular scent , and his experiments, he gravely assures us, prove him here as right as before. For not only can Dr. Jäger smell, for instance, bad temper or a tendency to procrastination in any individual, but by emitting the counteracting antidote odor, he can smooth the frown into a smile, and electrify the sluggard into despatch. Yet Dr. Jäger does not claim to possess within himself, his own actual body, more perfumes than any of his neighbors. He does not arrogate to himself any special odors, as did Mahomet and Alexander the Great, or ask to divide honors with the civet-cat or musk-deer. There is no insolent assumption of this kind about the professor, no unnatural straining after the possession of extraordinary attributes. He merely claims to have discovered by chemical research certain preparations, which, when volatilized, produce certain results upon the nostrils. There is no o’er-vaulting ambition in this. The merest tyro can compass as much with a very few ingredients; and, as a matter of fact, any boy of average, on. even the meanest, capacity can, by a courageous combination of the contents of his chemical chest, produce such effluvia as shall at once, and violently affect the nostrils of the whole household, not excluding the girl in the scullery or the cat on the nursery hearthrug. But the boy’s results are miscellaneous and fortuitous. He blunders upon a smell of extraordinary volume and force by, it may be, the merest accident, and quite unintentionally, therefore, lets loose upon himself the collective wrath of his family
