Democratic Sentinel, Volume 18, Number 17, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 11 May 1894 — A Singular Statement. [ARTICLE]

A Singular Statement.

Thoughtful and observant personedo not need a demonstration that the senses are less keen in woman than in man. Their own experience hasrevealed that natural law. But since we are not all thoughtful or observant, the experiments of Professors Nichols ana Brown are welcome. These American physiologists have begun to experiment with the sense of smell. They took four substances most strongly odoriferous—essence of clove, of garlic, of lemon, and prussic acid. Each of these they diluted with pure water in a growingproportion, filling a set of bottles at every degree of the scale, until the last set represented one part of the test substance to 2,000,000 parts of. water. They then shuffled the bottles so to speak, and called In fortyfour men and thirty-eight women, chosen from the various ranks of life;: all young and healthy. These representatives of either sex were instructed to re-arrange the bottles, guided, by the sense of smell, putting each set of tinctures by itself—garlic with, garlic, lemon with lemon, etc. To put results shortly, the women were not in it. None of them could trace prussic acid beyond the dilution of 20,000 parts to one, while most of the men traced it up to 100,000 parte. Three of the latter actually passed the extreme limit, identifying prussic acid at a single part in 2,000,000. Beyond 100,000 parts, all the women failed to recognize essence of lemon ;; all the men detected it at 250,000. This proportion represents their average superiority all around.— [Pall Mall Budget.