Smell

Use in the book

Alcmaeon locates the ruling faculty in the brain and explains smelling by its drawing in odors through inhalation. Empedocles’ report also makes odor enter with inhaled air, then uses difficulty in breathing to explain why odor may fail to be perceived. The second notice thus adduces an impaired condition to support a proposed mechanism of ordinary perception.

Places to read

1. I.54.1The ruling faculty draws in odors through inhalation.
2. I.54.2Obstructed breathing prevents the associated perception.

Translation in this edition

“Odor” usually names what enters; “smell” can name the resulting experience. Neither report supplies a modern account of sensory receptors.

Use in the book

The warm spring day joins sun, breeze, scent, and inward felicity in a compact sequence. May 1834 complicates that easy accord: humid air laden with the month’s perfumes induces languor and nearly dulls the senses. Scent can penetrate too fully, just as other natural influences can exceed the listener’s or viewer’s capacity.

Before leaving Le Val, Guérin parts box branches and thrusts his head into the undergrowth to breathe the wild perfumes concealed there. Sight has tried to take an imprint of the coast; smell now seeks an intimacy unavailable from a distant prospect. The gesture acknowledges that a place possesses recesses and hidden concentrations.

Onésime’s letter brings a portable version of that contact. What first seems a captured breeze proves to be actual petals, rose leaves, and grass. The scent is materially caused, yet its force exceeds the small contents. Elsewhere a happy household has a metaphorical perfume like invisible incense. The movement between literal and figurative smelling depends on diffusion, closeness, and the power of an atmosphere to envelop.

Places to read

1. 3 May 1833 · ¶1Spring scent belongs to an immediate conjunction of weather and felicity
2. 20 December 1833 · ¶1The happiness of a household is imagined as an enveloping invisible fragrance
3. 20 January 1834 · ¶2The farewell gesture seeks concealed woodland scent at close range
4. 7 May 1834 · ¶1Warm scents nearly saturate the senses
5. 22 August 1834 · ¶1A letter’s material plant fragments carry the country into an urban room

Translation in this edition

The English often keeps perfumes for parfums. In the natural scenes this should be understood as fragrances carried by plants and air, while warm scents for senteurs tièdes makes the bodily register of the rainy May atmosphere more explicit.

Use in the book

The general statement in B102 begins “in this way,” pointing back to an explanation not fully present in its one surviving line. The nearby respiration passage offers an intelligible comparison: aither moves inward and outward as blood recedes and returns. The edition’s sequence encourages the reader to connect breathing and smell, but does not preserve an uninterrupted transition proving the exact order of these fragments.

B101 supplies a concrete perceptual situation. The animal being tracked has moved on, leaving tiny bodily remains through contact of its feet with grass; nostrils investigate them. The perceived object reaches the perceiver through material traces, which makes a comparison with B89’s effluences especially fruitful. The word for effluence does not occur in the scent-tracking line, so the connection should be acknowledged as an interpretive relation rather than a repeated term.

The scope of “all things” in B102 also deserves restraint. It is a broad claim in the poet’s physical idiom, not a list of modern biological classes with experimentally established olfactory abilities. The fragment preserves an encompassing account of participation in breath and smell, while the precise distribution of organs or degrees of sensitivity remains outside the quoted evidence.

Places to read

1. B 102Breathing and smells are allocated together in a general statement.
2. B 101Nostrils investigate bodily fragments left by beasts in grass.
3. B 89Universal effluences offer a related account of material outflow.
4. B 1002Alternating aither movement supplies the fuller breathing mechanism.

Translation in this edition

Theophrastus is the witness for B102, but the edition prints only the one verse here. Its broader theory of smell, as summarized in other contexts, should not be quoted as though it were part of this line.

Use in the book

Theophrastus reports that smell occurs by breathing, and that those whose breathing moves most vigorously smell most keenly. Fine and light bodies emit the most odour. Aëtius offers a related association of lung-breathing with odour entering, citing diminished smell during catarrh. The latter adds a condition of impaired respiration rather than simply repeating the claim that more air always yields better smell.

Theophrastus develops several separate objections. Some smelling animals do not breathe; abundant inhalation does not help an unhealthy or obstructed sense; people breathing heavily through distress, labour, or sleep do not thereby smell best. Breathing may accompany smell incidentally without being its intrinsic cause. Finally, lightness alone cannot explain odour because air and fire are very light yet do not produce olfactory sensation. Each objection addresses a different relation: universality, organ condition, quantity of air, causation, or the object's constitution. These should not be collapsed into a generic complaint that the account is incorrect.

Places to read

1. A 86 § 9 (testimony)Theophrastus, On the Senses 9. Gives breathing, vigorous inhalation, and light bodies roles in smelling.
2. A 86 §§ 20–21 (polemical)2Theophrastus, On the Senses 21. Challenges the universality and quantitative sufficiency of the respiratory explanation.
3. A 86 §§ 22–23 (polemical)Theophrastus, On the Senses 22. Separates incidental respiration from the intrinsic cause of smell.
4. A 94 (testimony)Aëtius. Connects incoming smell with lung-breathing and its impairment in catarrh.

Translation in this edition

A94 does not erase Theophrastus's report of what he found lacking elsewhere. The witnesses can preserve differing selections and formulations; their notices should be compared without treating one as a complete repair of the other.