Opening Treatise on Odours — Theophrastus in Plato Scroll…
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Theophrastus · Arthur F. Hort
Odours in general, like tastes, are due to mixture: for anything which is uncompounded has no smell, just as it has no taste: wherefore simple substances have no smell, such as water air and fire: on the other hand earth is the only elementary substance which has a smell, or at least it has one to a greater extent than the others, because it is of a more composite character than they. Of odours some are, as it were, indistinct and insipid, as is the case with tastes, while some have a distinct character. And these characters appear to correspond to those of tastes, yet they have not in all cases the same names, as we said in a former treatise; nor in general are they marked off from one another by such specific differences as are tastes: rather the differences are, one may say, in generic character, some things having a good, some an evil odour. 2 But the various kinds of good or evil …
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