DISCUSSION 39 C•ax•a•: I understand that Drs. Foster and Wenzel are in the audience. Would they care to comment on the psycho- logical approach in this particular subject. DR. Fosx•R: I would rather not be dragged into this, as I made a positive state- ment yesterday. However, speaking as a psychologist to this group, I want to say, first, that we favor the position--the hope- ful note--that both of these speakers gave-- that there may ultimately be a classification. To take an analogy, if we have a sucrose solution--and we taste it--and Dr. Bogerr and all of the other variable people here taste it--the chances are pretty good that we would get almost 100 per cent agreement that it is a sweet material. Aristotle stated before the time of Christ the fact that there are four fundamental tastes in man. We do not know yet what the mechanism, what the stimulus, what the valid theory for taste is, but we do have definite agreement as to the categories involved--sweet, bitter, salty, and sour. You have at this meeting of cosmetic chemists, generated a great deal of heat on this question of classification. I want to assure you that among psychologists we would never get this much interest. I think that is sad, but it is true. Especially when you have in this group a man from Bristol- Myers who, for the first time, apparently has solved the riddle of the communality of taste--that is, what is common to taste ma- terials yielding the same taste quality. You are aware that chemically saccharine, sucrose, fructose, and materials of that type are quite different. But working as a physical chemist, he seems to have found the unique similarity. At the same time the principles that he found for sweet are appli- cable to the other categories. So again, taking the note of optimism from the pharmaceutical chemists who have analyzed and predicted drug action in cer- tain lines, I want to express the hope that, psychologically, the interest generated in this group of cosmetic chemists will penetrate to psychologists troubled by the problem of the language of odors and of inconsistencies in our responses. If, through some group of this type, we could standardize our conditions of study, we could standardize to the ab- solute ultimate, we could perhaps make some real sense out of smell. One other possi- bility: if you could picture, for a moment, that we may need certain artificial conditions for the study of sensation, and that if we could spray the nose with a certain material, and then subsequently expose a series of other materials to the nose, we might get a selective reproducible response. For this, we will have to resort to certain extreme condi- tions. Again, that is the psychologist's hope. But may I close these remarks with a note to Mr. Crocker, that we like his idea of trying something, of doing something, of provoking great interest here and to Mr. Sagatin for pointing out that maybe we haven't reached any place yet and that we do need to keep on, along any line that we can, to get to the fundamental question of classification of sense stimuli. CHAX•tMAX•: Thank you very much. Our time is running a little short. We may have time for one more comment from the floor. MR. MOELLER: I come here as a guest, and perhaps I am out of order. Through my own experience, I have found that the constitutional psychology advocated by (William H.) Sheldon has been of great help to me in classifying, first of all, the indi- viduals on whom I intended to experiment, and, secondly, in finding there a real guide for analyzing the emotional reaction to per- fumes. I wonder if perhaps Mr. Crocker and Mr. Sagatin are acquainted with this branch of psychology. I believe that Shel- don was a professor of psychology at Harvard --I don't know where he is now. He has written two very illuminating books, one dealing with the human constitution and the other dealing with temperament. He states there that the physical aspects of the human species have a great deal to do with tempera- ment, and finds very close correlation be- tween appearance and temperament. Although a layman, perhaps, cotild not duplicate Sheldon's system of classification in all details, he could, however, by studying the system, devise his own method. After reading his books carefully, and applying the

40 JOURNAL OF THE SOCIETY OF COSMETIC CHEMISTS theory primarily within my circle of friends, I found a way of tabulating consumer pref- erences for various types of perfumes. Psychological reasons for such preferences exist and it is possible to predict which type of perfume would appeal to people falling within a certain range of Sheldon's types. M•. S•to•tv.x• (summarizing): Several points have been raised in this discussion which I believe are worthy of further com- ment and investigation. Mr. Crowder be- lieves that there is sufficient agreement on which to base a classification system when a large number of people will state that a barn smells like a barn. Classification consists in finding similarities of quality among dif- ferent materials that are not present in others and therefore differentiating them from other materials. If we could find agreement among many people that there is a similar olfactory response when smelling a barn, a field of grass, and a pine forest, and if this same response were not obtained when one is smelling other things, then it would be pos- sible to classify these various materials into one category. My objection to classification of olfactory reactions is simply that large numbers of people do not find the same similarities and differences. To state that a barn smells like a barn is merely to say that it smells like itself. When we say glass is glass, we are not classifying it. When we say that something is a chemical compound, or a plastic, or a metal, or what- ever else we may believe it to be, then we are putting it into one category with other sub- stances and we are differentiating it from still others. This is classification. ! believe that, in the remarks of Dr. Four- man, there is a fundamental error. Dr. Fourman draws upon an analogy between the classification of plants and that of odors. He points out, and rightly so, that it was not necessary to have a theory of plants to have a classification, but merely to have observa- tions of similarities and differences. I agree as far as that goes. However, the crux of the question is that the botanical observa- tions that were made by Linnaeus could be repeated and agreed upon by everyone. It is precisely because of the complete lack of agreement on olfactory observations that we are forced to reject this method of creating a classification system. It is only because the observations are unreliable and are not re- producible that we have come to the conclu- sion that a sound theory of odor is a neces- sary prerequisite for a valid system of classi- fication. I believe that the entire discussion was summarized extremely well in the remarks that were made by Dr. Bogert and by Dean Foster. Dean Foster stated that we do not have to know what the mechanism or stimu- lus for taste may be and that we do not have a really valid theory of taste, but we do have definite agreement as to the taste categories involved. Dr. Bogeft pointed out that we are relying on a very unreliable experimental animal, namely the human being. It is precisely because our experimental animal is as unreliable as it is, that we do not have the agreement in olfaction that we have been able to reach in taste. This is, in short, the reason that I have found systems of classi- fications to be invalid. MR. Cwoc•cEv. (summarizing): From the limited discussion from the floor that was possible today, it is evident that many work- ers have odor classification schemes of their own, to help them in their work. The classi- fication scheme of which I am a co-sponsor has been used effectively for well over twenty years, by myself and co-workers, so far with- out finding any indication that it was based on a false assumption. It seems uncalled for, therefore, to argue against any and all such schemes, especially since at least one of them is capable of a considerable measure of statistical checking. No scheme has to be complete or correct in every detail to be useful, analytically and descriptively. Every one of us looks forward to the dis- covery of the physical nature of olfaction and to the possibilities that this discovery may open up for objective odor classifica- tion. Until such time arrives, we are surely entitled to use any classification scheme that works. When that time arrives, it may be found that parts of several of our schemes may even have anticipated phases of actuality.