"Olfactory" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... door of a bake-shop, and a pervading odor fills the air. I think "hot rolls," because my organ of smell—the nose—has received a stimulus which it transmits along my olfactory nerves to the brain; and there the odor is given a name—"hot rolls." The recognition of the stimulus as an odor and of that odor as "hot rolls" is consciousness in the form of thinking. But the odor ...
— Applied Psychology for Nurses • Mary F. Porter
... just what I'm trying to say," Jake cried. "Look, why do we have any sense of smell at all? Because we have tiny olfactory nerve endings buried in the mucous membrane of our noses and throats. But we have always had the virus living there, too, colds or no colds, throughout our entire lifetime. It's always been there, ...
— The Coffin Cure • Alan Edward Nourse
... trees of the Grunewald. Forgotten, there, are the roses on the moonlit garden wall in Barbizon, chaperoned by the fairy forest of Fontainebleau; forgotten the damp wild clover fields of the Indiana of my boyhood. All vanished, gone, before the olfactory transports of this concert of hops and schnitzels, of Rhineland vineyards and upland kaese. And here it is, here in the great German out-of-doors, on the border of the Hundekehlen lake, with a nimble kellner at my elbow, with the ...
— Europe After 8:15 • H. L. Mencken, George Jean Nathan and Willard Huntington Wright
... who scents himself with some doctor's stuff like cologne?" continued Low, with the disgust of keen olfactory sensibilities. ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... not have talked so much about these personal susceptibilities, if I had not a remark to make about them which I believe is a new one. It is this. There may be a physical reason for the strange connection between the sense of smell and the mind. The olfactory nerve—so my friend, the Professor, tells me—is the only one directly connected with the hemispheres of the brain, the parts in which, as we have every reason to believe, the intellectual processes are performed. To speak more truly the olfactory "nerve" is not a nerve at all, ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... living? Here, all are alive; and the Bee pierces her way as through a row of corpses. If I am told that the smell of the Solenii may differ from that of the Osmiae, I shall reply that such extreme subtlety in the insect's olfactory apparatus seems to me a rather far-fetched supposition. Then what is my explanation of the two facts? The explanation? I have none to give! I am quite content to know that I do not know, which at least spares me many vain lucubrations. And ...
— Bramble-bees and Others • J. Henri Fabre
... the nasal cavity lies a small brownish patch of mucous membrane. It is here that the olfactory nerve endings are located. The substance smelled must be volatile, that is, must exist in gaseous form, and come in direct contact with the nerve endings. Chemical action results in a ...
— The Mind and Its Education • George Herbert Betts
... blasphemous did their jests appear to him. An unusually fat bullock caused them to speak of the fine regalement he would be to Jahveh's nostrils. One sacristan, mentioning the sacred name, figured Jahveh as pressing forward with dilated nostrils. There is no belly in heaven, he said: its joys are entirely olfactory, and when this beast is smoking, Jahveh will call down the angels Michael and Gabriel. As if not satisfied with this blasphemy, as if it were not enough, he turned to the sacristans by him, to ask them if they could ...
— The Brook Kerith - A Syrian story • George Moore
... this woman who had brought him, for no apparent reason, upon such an uncomfortable journey, he simply took matters into his own big head and without a with or by your leave waddled off, book in slobbering mouth, to look for his beloved, whom—his olfactory powers not being of the keenest—he felt to be somewhere in the neighbourhood, perhaps playing at hide-and-seek behind the tents, as she did on wet mornings ...
— The Hawk of Egypt • Joan Conquest
... sincerity, it was evident that he felt somewhat disappointed at the consignment. The old gentleman looked very wise upon the subject, lifted his gold-framed spectacles upon his forehead, gratified his olfactory nerves with a pinch of snuff, and then said in a cold, measured tone, "Well, if he's a nigger, I see no alternative,—the circumstances may give a coloring of severity to the law; but my opinion has always been, that the construction of the law was right; and the act being founded upon necessity, ...
— Manuel Pereira • F. C. Adams
... down and stretched right across the palm, and the little finger extended to the utmost. In an instant the great secret—the secret that Darwin had studied so strenuously for years—was revealed to him. The language of animals was olfactory. The tiger spoke to him through the sense of smell—through his nose instead of his ears. It regulated and modified the odour it gave off from its body, and which worked its way out through the pores ...
— The Sorcery Club • Elliott O'Donnell
... bearing upon the presence or absence of white colors in the higher animals have lately been adduced by Dr. Ogle. It has been found that a colored or dark pigment in the olfactory region of the nostrils is essential to perfect smell, and this pigment is rarely deficient except when the whole animal is pure white. In these cases the creature is almost without smell or taste. This, Dr. Ogle believes, ...
— Scientific American, Volume XXXVI., No. 8, February 24, 1877 • Various
... of, were pronounced by Galbraith to be junk. He had made superhuman efforts, he told Goldsmith and Block, to put a little life into them, and had demonstrated that this miracle was impossible of performance. They were dead and they'd got to be buried before they became, to the olfactory ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... la Harpe toward the City. As he passed the Rue de la Huchette, the odor of those admirable spits, which were incessantly turning, tickled his olfactory apparatus, and he bestowed a loving glance toward the Cyclopean roast, which one day drew from the Franciscan friar, Calatagirone, this pathetic exclamation: Veramente, queste rotisserie sono cosa stupenda!* But Jehan ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... doubtless, have the sense of smell, although we can discover no special olfactory organ. This sense would seem to be as old as ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler
... taught me the means of driving Bruckhausen from my dungeon, and of inducing him to commit his office to another. I learnt his olfactory nerves were somewhat delicate, and whenever I heard the doors unbar, I took care to make a stir in my night-table. This made him give back, and at length he would come no farther than the door. Such are the hard expedients of a poor ...
— The Life and Adventures of Baron Trenck - Vol. 2 (of 2) • Baron Trenck
... Riviere Ouelle, in order that the beluga might not be frightened, to the ruin of the extensive fishery that has existed there for more than two hundred years. Its sight, touch and taste are also well developed but it has no olfactory nerve and is apparently without the sense of smell. The creature has qualities that we should hardly expect. It has been tamed and almost domesticated. The enterprising Barnum exhibited in New York a beluga which drew a boat about in his aquarium. At Boston another ...
— A Canadian Manor and Its Seigneurs - The Story of a Hundred Years, 1761-1861 • George M. Wrong
... itself, that there must necessarily be as many modes of conveying our impressions to our fellow-creatures, as there are senses or modes of receiving impressions in them. Accordingly, there are five senses and five languages; to wit, the audible, the visible, the olfactory, the gustatory, and the sensitive. To the two first belong speech and literature. As illustrations of the third, or olfactory language, may be cited the presentation of a pinch of Prince's Mixture to a stranger, or a bottle of "Bouquet du Roi" to a fair acquaintance; both of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... to building No. 2, olfactory evidence presents itself of the immediate vicinity of a chemical laboratory. This is confirmed as one enters the door and finds that the entire building is devoted to chemistry. Long rows of shelves and cabinets filled with chemicals line the ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... the past, and reckless of the future, we were enjoying the present moment in this badinage, and I was extolling the odour of the rose, as beyond every other grateful to the olfactory nerves of man, a lively, flippant little personage came up, and accosted the Brahmin with the familiarity of an acquaintance. My companion immediately introduced me to him, and at the same time gave ...
— A Voyage to the Moon • George Tucker
... smell, scent; snuff, snuff up; sniff, nose, inhale. Adj. odorous, odoriferous; smelling, reeking, foul-smelling, strong- scented; redolent, graveolent[obs3], nidorous[obs3], pungent; putrid, foul. [Relating to the sense of smell] olfactory, quick-scented. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... fingers, and the blood pattered on the dark soil, that in all probability had never tasted moisture before. All this amused my pursuer vastly; it watched with the leisure of one who knows its fish will be landed in safety, and there suddenly came to me, through my olfactory nerves, a knowledge that it was speaking to me in the language of scents—the language I never understood till now was the ...
— Animal Ghosts - Or, Animal Hauntings and the Hereafter • Elliott O'Donnell
... of insects are an olfactory organ turned inside out, prominent in space, and, further, very mobile. This allows us to suppose that the sense of smell may be much more relational than ours, that the sensations thence derived give them ideas of space ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... of mankind as something distinct and apart from the body, is thus exhibited as but part and parcel of it. A deaf, dumb, and blind animal, deprived of tongue, and olfactory mucous membrane, without sensations from the outside world can grow no mind, in the sense of intelligence. The sense organs of the body mediate the primary mind stuff. Without internal secretions and a vegetative system there could be no soul, in the sense of ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... That was not a nature smell; horrible though it was it was not the tragic smell of corruption. It had something, almost one might say, low down about it, little, mean, business-like—it was her first sniff of returning Civilization, the first impression on an olfactory sense cleared and cleaned ...
— The Beach of Dreams • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... of smell is far less complicated in its structure than the eye or the ear. It consists of two cavities having cartilaginous walls, and lined with a thick mucous coat, termed the pituitary membrane, over which are reflected the olfactory nerves. Particles of matter, too minute to be visible even through the microscope, are detached from the odorous body and come in contact with the nerves of smell, which transmit the impressions or impulses thus received to the brain. Fig. 65 shows the distribution ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... futilities were extensive and thorough. At one time he nearly gave up his classes for intensive culture, so enamoured was he of its possibilities; the peculiar pungency of the manure he got, in pursuit of a chemical theory of his own, has scarred my olfactory memories for a lifetime. The intensive culture phase is very clear in my memory; it came near the end of his career and when I was between eleven and twelve. I was mobilised to gather caterpillars on several occasions, and assisted in nocturnal raids upon ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... that infinitely smaller particles act on our nerves. When a dog stands a quarter of a mile to leeward of a deer or other animal, and perceives its presence, the odorous particles produce some change in the olfactory nerves; yet these particles must be infinitely smaller* than those of the phosphate of ammonia weighing the one-twenty-millionth of a grain. These nerves then transmit some influence to the brain of the dog, which leads to action on its part. With Drosera, the really marvellous fact is, ...
— Insectivorous Plants • Charles Darwin
... the farina and petals is considered unwholesome, however agreeable it may be to the senses, whether the plant be in a state of vegetation or not, it being too powerful for the olfactory nerve. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 342, November 22, 1828 • Various
... consequently, by the side or in the stead of our modern science, the work of our eyes and hands—and also of our words—there might have been constituted, there may still be constituted, sciences entirely and extraordinarily new—auditory, olfactory, and gustatory sciences, and even others derived from other kinds of sensations which we can neither foresee nor conceive because they are not, for the moment, differentiated in us. Outside the matter we know, a very special matter fashioned of vision and touch, there may exist other ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet
... great distance; the body of an animal is frequently surrounded by a dozen or more of them, almost as soon as it has dropped dead, although five minutes before there was not a single bird in view. Whether this power is to be attributed to the keenness of his olfactory or his visual organs, is a matter still in dispute; although it is believed, from a minute observation of its habits in confinement, to be rather owing to ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... at it in this light. Music is merely background, and ought to be kept in its place. I am no enemy of music, George. The air in a room should be melodious, for the same reason that it should be faintly pleasing to the olfactory sense, and neither hot nor stuffy. Just as the walls should be delightfully coloured and softly lit, and the refreshments pleasant and at the moment of need. But surely we meet for human intercourse. When I go to see people I go to see the people—not ...
— Select Conversations with an Uncle • H. G. Wells
... marks a side view, and the letter B a top view. The small italics throughout signify the following homologous parts: m, medulla; cb, cerebellum; op, optic lobes; cr, cerebrum and thalamus; ol, olfactory lobes. The series shows a progressive consolidation and enlargement of the brain in general, and of the cerebrum and cerebellum in particular, which likewise exhibit continually advancing structure ...
— Darwin, and After Darwin (Vol. 1 and 3, of 3) • George John Romanes
... lofty hills. The weather during the greater part of the day had been dull and lowering, and we found the atmosphere of Betanzos insupportably close and heavy. Sour and disagreeable odours assailed our olfactory organs from all sides. The streets were filthy—so were the houses, and especially the posada. We entered the stable; it was strewed with rotten sea-weeds and other rubbish, in which pigs were wallowing; huge and loathsome flies were buzzing around. "What a pest-house!" I exclaimed. ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... of "the eternal fitness of things." No action on the part of the Federal Government was so abhorrent to the rebel army. It called forth a bitter wail from Jefferson Davis, on the 12th of January, 1863, and soon after the Confederate Congress elevated its olfactory organ and handled the subject with a pair of tongs. After a long discussion the ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... lower animals take cognizance of vibrations that mean nothing to us. Insects hear notes far above our dull ears. Ants are susceptible to lights and colors unseen to our limited eyes. The emperor-moth calls its mate—so says Fabre—by means of olfactory vibrations totally uncomprehended by us. The universe is full of hues, tones, radiant phenomena that escape us, because our senses are not ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England
... The olfactory, optic, oculo-motor, pathetic, ophthalmic division of the trigeminal, and the abducens nerves are ...
— Manual of Surgery Volume Second: Extremities—Head—Neck. Sixth Edition. • Alexander Miles
... the nostril. I remember this distinctly; and now, at a distance of more than sixty years, I recall my utter astonishment as a boy, at seeing my grand-uncle, with whom I lived in early days, put a thin piece of tobacco fairly up his nose. I suppose the plug acted as a continued stimulant on the olfactory nerve, and was, in short, like taking a perpetual pinch ...
— Reminiscences of Scottish Life and Character • Edward Bannerman Ramsay
... other Mr. Polton what I want," said the cabman, with his eyes still riveted on the olfactory prominence. ...
— The Mystery of 31 New Inn • R. Austin Freeman
... Droit et l'Homme Gauche," Revue Philosophique, October, 1901. It is here shown that in the constitution of their nervous system the ambidextrous are demonstrably left-sided persons; their optic, acoustic, olfactory, and muscular sensitivity is preponderant on the ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... earthquake!"—See Tschudi's Travels in Peru page 170.); and it rarely happens that a false alarm is given by a native. Those who are most apprehensive attentively observe the motions of dogs, goats, and swine. The last-mentioned animals, endowed with delicate olfactory nerves, and accustomed to turn up the earth, give warning of approaching danger by their restlessness and their cries. We shall not attempt to decide, whether, being nearer the surface of the ground, ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... as they thought it would, anything but agreeable to the olfactory nerves of our young friends; though their attention was soon diverted from what was offensive, by the very amusing gymnastics of the monkeys, who, while they performed their various feats of skill, had evidently an eye to the main chance, ...
— Aunt Mary • Mrs. Perring
... tentacle, causing its basal part to bend, often through an angle of 180 degrees." But odoriferous particles which act upon the nerves of animals must be infinitely smaller, and by these a dog a quarter of a mile to the leeward of a deer perceives his presence by some change in the olfactory nerves transmitted ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... is, of course, that absolutely nothing in the way of abstract mental content is inferable from the mere fact that we can use intelligently words of which the meaning is abstract. It is clear that a sufficiently ingenious person could manufacture a machine moved by olfactory stimuli which, whenever a dog appeared in its neighbourhood, would say, "There is a dog," and when a cat appeared would throw stones at it. The act of saying "There is a dog," and the act of throwing stones, would in such a case be equally mechanical. Correct ...
— The Analysis of Mind • Bertrand Russell
... broken cover of the soap dish, and brought forth a cake which he tendered gingerly to Dennis for his olfactory inspection. ...
— Skippy Bedelle - His Sentimental Progress From the Urchin to the Complete - Man of the World • Owen Johnson
... which the wind is tainted over miles of space by certain offensive animals must be infinitely minute and numerous; yet they strongly affect the olfactory nerves. An analogy more appropriate is afforded by the contagious particles of certain diseases, which are so minute that they float in the atmosphere and adhere to smooth paper; yet we know how largely ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin
... that evening, with my brain slightly confused by a few glasses of wine, a vague whiff of Oriental perfume delicately titillated my olfactory nerves. The heat of the room had warmed the natron, bitumen, and myrrh in which the paraschistes, who cut open the bodies of the dead, had bathed the corpse of the princess. It was a perfume at once sweet and penetrating, a perfume ...
— The Mummy's Foot • Theophile Gautier
... pea-water, for the pease and the soup, all but about a gallon or two, were taken for the ship's company, and the coppers filled up with water, and brought down to us in a strap-tub. And Sir, I might have defied any person on earth, possessing the most acute olfactory powers and the most refined taste to decide, either by one or the other or both of these senses, whether it was pease and water, slush and water, ...
— American Prisoners of the Revolution • Danske Dandridge
... marked the place where a cheering fire had formerly blazed. As regarded this latter spot, the good old custom was not, even now, totally abrogated. An iron plate, covered with crackling wood, sustained a ponderous black caldron, the rich steam from which gratefully affected the olfactory organs of the highwayman. ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... Prof. Bianconi 'La Theorie Darwinienne' 1874 page 279.) The difference in size between the brains of dogs belonging to large and small breeds "is something prodigious." "Some dogs' brains are high and rounded, while others are low, long, and narrow in front." In the latter, "the olfactory lobes are visible for about half their extent, when the brain is seen from above, but they are wholly concealed by the hemispheres in other breeds." (1/56. Dr. Burt Wilder 'American Assoc. Advancement ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication - Volume I • Charles Darwin
... did not come. The olfactory nerves remained placid, until the visitors had departed. Then she retreated to the inner cave, drew the grey shawl over her head, and awaited the development of ...
— The Hot Swamp • R.M. Ballantyne |
