"Olfactory" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... With a little care and attention, a kitchen garden, though small, might be rendered not only useful, but, in fact, as ornamental as a modern grass lawn; and the same expense incurred to make the ground a laboratory of sweets, might suffice to render it agreeable to the palate as well as to the olfactory nerves, and that even without offending the most delicate optics. It is only in accordance with our plan to give the hint and to put before the reader such novel points as may facilitate the proposed ...
— Enquire Within Upon Everything - The Great Victorian Domestic Standby • Anonymous
... regards its form, colour, varieties, and delicious perfume, description is needless, though I may say, in passing, that its fragrance renders it of value to those whose olfactory nerve is dead to the ...
— Hardy Perennials and Old Fashioned Flowers - Describing the Most Desirable Plants, for Borders, - Rockeries, and Shrubberies. • John Wood
... I found myself lying on a bed in a middle-sized chamber, lighted by a candle, which stood on a table; an elderly man stood near me, and a yet more elderly female was holding a phial of very pungent salts to my olfactory organ. I attempted to move, but felt very stiff—my right arm appeared nearly paralyzed, and there was a strange dull sensation in my head. 'You had better remain still, young man,' said the elderly individual, 'the surgeon will be here presently; I have sent a message for him to the neighbouring ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... persons sneeze from looking up at the light sky in a morning after coming out of a dark bedroom. The olfactory nerves are brought into too great action by their sympathy with the optic nerves, or by their respective sympathies with some intervening parts, as probably with the two extremities of the lacrymal sac; that is, with the puncta lacrymalia and the nasal duct. See Class ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... tablespoonfuls of sorghum is unhealthy! There is danger of its burning out the stomach! So at each supper after that I had to get along with two spoonfuls. As far as the tea was concerned, it was made of some unknown material whose aroma was unfamiliar to my olfactory; the taste was likewise unfamiliar, and in consequence of these peculiarities of the prison tea I never imbibed of it but the one time, that being amply sufficient to last through the entire period ...
— The Twin Hells • John N. Reynolds
... a foot from Duke's nose, and the little dog's dreams began to be troubled by his olfactory nerve. This faithful sentinel, on guard even while Duke slept, signalled that alarums and excursions by parties unknown were taking place, and suggested that attention might well be paid. Duke opened one drowsy eye. What ...
— Penrod and Sam • Booth Tarkington
... child. How keen your scent is! It is always so with us. Your grandfather was noted for his olfactory powers. Ah, a great loss, dear Mrs. Ridd, a terrible loss to this neighbourhood! As one of our great writers says—I think it must be Milton—'We ne'er shall ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... food from a 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
... stirring the broth in the basin slowly round and round, and spreading a peculiar vulgar odour which at first filled the invalid with annoyance; but as it pervaded the place it somehow began to have a decided effect upon the boy's olfactory nerves and excited within him a strange yearning which drove away every token ...
— Fitz the Filibuster • George Manville Fenn
... was hot, and the shop, close shut and surrounded by so foul a neighbourhood, was ill-smelling. Monsieur Defarge's olfactory sense was by no means delicate, but the stock of wine smelt much stronger than it ever tasted, and so did the stock of rum and brandy and aniseed. He whiffed the compound of scents away, as he ...
— A Tale of Two Cities - A Story of the French Revolution • Charles Dickens
... must have been undistinguishable from the blended scents of all their fellow passengers. Those who have visited Wombwell's menagerie, or stood in the monkey-house of the Zoological Gardens, doubtless retain a lively recollection of olfactory disgust, even although in those places the must scrupulous cleanliness is observed; but their experience of such smells would have been totally eclipsed if they could but for a moment have stood within Noah's ark ...
— Bible Romances - First Series • George W. Foote
... from Hannah, had been cunningly secreted by Aileen between the imbricate petals, and then tied, in a manner invisible at night, with a fine thread of pink silk begged from Ann. It was now acting and re-acting on the lining of the serenader's olfactory organ in a manner to threaten final decapitation. Champney was still young enough to resent being made a subject of such practical joking by a little girl; but he was also sufficiently wise to acknowledge to himself that he had been worsted and, in the end, to put a ...
— Flamsted quarries • Mary E. Waller
... check the use of firearms on the point at 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 beluga from the St. Lawrence drew ...
— A Canadian Manor and Its Seigneurs - The Story of a Hundred Years, 1761-1861 • George M. Wrong
... (e) The olfactory image is even more delicate. Some there are who are affected to illness by the memory of certain odors, while others experience the most delectable sensations by the rise of ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... Forum, and was built by Porcius Cato, from whom it was called the "Porcian Basilica." Twenty others were afterwards erected at different periods in the city. The loungers here mentioned, in the present instance, were probably sauntering about under the porticos of the Basilica, when their olfactory nerves were offended by the unsavoury smell ...
— The Captiva and The Mostellaria • Plautus
... night, with my brain somewhat muddled by the effects of a few glasses of wine, a vague whiff of oriental perfume tickled delicately my olfactory nerves. The heat of the room had warmed the natron, the bitumen, and the myrrh in which the paraschites who embalmed the dead had bathed the body of the Princess; it was a delicate, yet penetrating perfume, which four thousand years had ...
— Humorous Ghost Stories • Dorothy Scarborough
... peculiarity of the male Crustacea consists not unfrequently in a more abundant development on the flagellum of the anterior antennae of delicate filaments which Spence Bate calls "auditory cilia," and which I have considered to be olfactory organs, as did Leydig before me, although I was not aware of it. Thus they form long dense tufts in the males of many Diastylidae, as Van Beneden also states with regard to Bodotria, whilst the females ...
— Facts and Arguments for Darwin • Fritz Muller
... judge on the way to his carriage tumbled downstairs and, miserabile dictu, broke his nose, an accident which compelled him to confine himself to the house for some time. He reappeared, however, with a large patch on his olfactory member, which gave a most ludicrous expression to his face. On someone inquiring how this happened, he said it was the effect of his studies. "Studies!" ejaculated the inquirer. "Yes," growled the judge; "ye've heard, nae doot, about ...
— Law and Laughter • George Alexander Morton
... quite dumbfounded. Americans amused but not excited. One hundred to one on Buttons eagerly offered, but no takers. Beppo jumped to his feet like a wild cat. Eyes encircled with ebon aurioles, olfactory quite demolished. Made a rush at Buttons, who, being a member of the Dodge Club, dodged him, and landed a rattler on the jugular, which again sent foreign ...
— The Dodge Club - or, Italy in 1859 • James De Mille
... on three sides by 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. But we could ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... strong smell of roasted meat saluted my nostrils, causing a very unphilosophical pleasure to the olfactory nerves, a pleasure which acted very directly, too, on the gastric juices of the stomach. In plain English, I had very sensible evidence that it was not enough to transport a man to the monikin region, send him to parliament, and ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper
... all bereft of this Vorstellungs-Kraft of which you speak, nor am I, like so many of my brethren, a mere vacuum as regards scientific knowledge. I can follow a particle of musk until it reaches the olfactory nerve; I can follow the waves of sound until their tremors reach the water of the labyrinth, and set the otoliths and Corti's fibres in motion; I can also visualise the waves of aether as they cross the ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... Chevalier. N.B. I have got a 1/8 inch object-glass, and it is grand. I have been getting on well with my beloved Cirripedia, and get more skilful in dissection. I have worked out the nervous system pretty well in several genera, and made out their ears and nostrils (27/4. For the olfactory sacs see Darwin's "Monograph of the Cirripedia," 1851, page 52.), which were quite unknown. I have lately got a bisexual cirripede, the male being microscopically small and parasitic within the sack of the female. I tell you this to boast of my species theory, for the nearest closely allied ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... their function and topography. One of the most puzzling features in its structure, and, at the same time, one of the greatest obstacles to the view that it is essentially primitive and not merely a degenerate creature, is the entire absence of the paired organs of special sense, olfactory, optic and auditory, which are so characteristic of the higher vertebrates. Although it is true that there is a certain amount of gradation in the degree of development to which these organs have attained in the various orders, yet it is hardly ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... that in the future it may be different; and that, 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 ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet
... mongrel pattern; armless, with perforated wooden seats; legs tortured by the lathe to a semblance of buttons strung on a rod; and they had that day received a streaky coat of a gilding preparation which exhaled the olfactory vehemence mentioned. Their present station was temporary, their purpose, as obviously, to dry; and they were doing some incidental gilding on their own account, leaving blots and splashes and sporadic little round ...
— The Flirt • Booth Tarkington
... specialists. It would be tedious to name all the varieties, but I can guarantee the unequipped that all known specimens have been carefully labelled, except possibly the odorous ghost, the ghost, that is to say, who manifests exclusively to the olfactory organ. This is an exceedingly withdrawn inappreciable kind, but it is familiar to Jean Kostka, who is a connoisseur in the smell supernatural, and has a trained psychic nose. He can distinguish between the spiritual perfume which characterises, let us say, St Stanislaus and the odorem ...
— Devil-Worship in France - or The Question of Lucifer • Arthur Edward Waite
... hall as he entered, but said nothing. He had his olfactory sense developed to an abnormal degree, but he was a ...
— The Secret House • Edgar Wallace
... 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 ...
— Manuel Pereira • F. C. Adams
... bettermost houses—for the poor were content with a hole in the roof—sat a youth of some sixteen years of age, busily attending to a large pot over the fire, from which, from time to time, savoury fumes ascended, the odour of which gladdened even the olfactory organs of our ...
— The Rival Heirs being the Third and Last Chronicle of Aescendune • A. D. Crake
... forged, and witnesses invented. And this theory is to be swallowed in one solid and indigestible lump, unleavened with logic, unmoistened with grammar, unsweetened with rhetoric. Let those whose appetites are strong, and whose olfactory nerves are not too delicate, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various
... never again assuming its normal tilt. She held small Pete by one chubby hand, and with a wry face he was licking out an absurd little red tongue at least twice each moment, as if uncertain as to whether his olfactory or gustatory nerves had been offended. Billy was standing with the nonchalant unconcern of one strong of stomach, and the four other little Poteets, ranging in size from Shoofly, on the floor, to Tobe, the buried, ...
— Rose of Old Harpeth • Maria Thompson Daviess
... defense 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 sense, ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... by inflammation of the membrane of the nasal cavities and air passages, which is followed by ulceration, when nature, in order to shelter this delicate tissue, and protect the olfactory nerves, throws a tough membrane over the ...
— Intestinal Ills • Alcinous Burton Jamison
... lately been much mortified with contemplating an unlucky imperfection in the very framing and construction of my soul; namely, a blundering inaccuracy of her olfactory organs in hitting the scent of craft or design in my fellow-creatures. I do not mean any compliment to my ingenuousness, or to hint that the defect is in consequence of the unsuspicious simplicity of conscious truth and honour: I take it to be, in some way or other, an imperfection in the mental ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... Mrs. Patterson of Massachusetts were not absent. Joseph's rubicund complexion, brassy and distinctly Know-Nothing look, and nasal organ well developed by his experience on the olfactory committee, were just what might have been expected. The 'make up' of Mrs. P., a bright brunette, was capital, and she looked the woman, if not the lady, to perfection. The two appeared in a handsome livery buggy, paid for, we suppose, by the State ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... consciousness of former perception. Without these adjuncts the repetition of these perceptions would be useless as instruments of knowledge. Avoiding a lengthened detail concerning the other senses, it will be sufficient to instance the olfactory organ. If we scent the essences of rose or jasmine, on the second presentation, they are recognised as having occurred before: should we have smelled the same perfumes from the living plants that exhale them, and by the eye noticed them, we should ...
— On the Nature of Thought - or, The act of thinking and its connexion with a perspicuous sentence • John Haslam
... 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 ...
— Bramble-bees and Others • J. Henri Fabre
... a fish is very small, compared with the spinal cord into which it is continued, and with the nerves which come off from it: of the segments of which it is composed—the olfactory lobes, the cerebral hemisphere, and the succeeding divisions—no one predominates so much over the rest as to obscure or cover them; and the so-called optic lobes are, frequently, the largest masses of all. In Reptiles, the mass of the brain, relatively to the spinal ...
— On the Relations of Man to the Lower Animals • Thomas H. Huxley
... from the thought of returning to town and placing himself at her mercy. Yet what option had he? While thus musing, he turned impatiently round, and saw that the shabby man and the dusty hag were engaged in an amicable game of ecarte, with those very cards which had so offended his olfactory organs. At that sight the old instinct of the gambler struggled back; and, raising himself up, he looked over the cards of the players. The miserable wretches were, of course, playing for nothing; and Losely saw at a glance ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... from his work when you enter his presence, and you approach close to his desk; if you are immaculate in dress and body, you will appeal agreeably to his olfactory sense. The law of the association of ideas will then begin to work in your favor. Your prospect will get subconsciously a conscious ...
— Certain Success • Norval A. Hawkins
... lighted a candle, and in the course of a few minutes admitted Woodward to his herbarium. When the latter entered, he looked about him with a curiosity not unnatural under the circumstances. His first sensation, however, was one that affected his olfactory nerves very strongly. A combination of smells, struggling with each other, as it were, for predominance, almost overpowered him. The good and the bad, the pleasant and the oppressive, were here mingled up in one sickening ...
— The Evil Eye; Or, The Black Spector - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... from the exquisite sensibility of her palate, that we admire and judge of the cook; from the alliance between the olfactory and sapid organs, it will be seen that their ...
— The Cook's Oracle; and Housekeeper's Manual • William Kitchiner
... 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 ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... first time empty. Lopepe, which I had formerly seen a stream running from a large reedy pool, was also dry. The hot salt spring of Serinane, east of Lopepe, being undrinkable, we pushed on to Mashue for its delicious waters. In traveling through this country, the olfactory nerves are frequently excited by a strong disagreeable odor. This is caused by a large jet-black ant named "Leshonya". It is nearly an inch in length, and emits a pungent smell when alarmed, in the same manner ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... The olfactory, optic, oculo-motor, pathetic, ophthalmic division of the trigeminal, and the abducens nerves are all liable ...
— Manual of Surgery Volume Second: Extremities—Head—Neck. Sixth Edition. • Alexander Miles |
