THE SCENT OF LEAVES.
Personally I am inclined to believe that dogs can smell leaves, if not flowers. With what fussy precision spaniels, which are particularly addicted to eating grass, will select one species of grass and reject another 1 and they certainly appear to be using their noses as well as their' eyes during the period of selection. Incidentally the green food that some dogs, at any rate, prefer before any other is goose- grass, which certainly has a faint scent even for our grosser perceptions, though, doubtless, it is more easily distinguished either by touch or sight. The chemists have attempted, not with complete success, to class the different smells, and it is doubtless possible that they differ widely enough in character to bear a completely different relation to the sense of smell in this animal or that. Small flies are drawn to the foetid shaft of the wild arum as the bee to the clover or the Red Admiral to the sedum. It may well be that the quality of the smell of a leaf, as in ribes or sweetbriar, is nearer akin to the animal smells than is any flower, and so perceptible to the dog. Observers need co-operation with the chemist or physicist for the solution of the question. We know already, in regard to insects, . which prefer aminoid, indoloid and paraffinoid smells. It should be as easy to detect the dog's preferences.
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