In doing so I held it within a few inches of my eyes, and was conscious of a faint smell of the scent known as white jessamine. There are seventy-five perfumes, which it is very necessary that a criminal expert should be able to distinguish from each other, and cases have more than once within my own experience depended upon their prompt recognition. The scent suggested the presence of a lady...
— Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes on perfume, from The Hound of the Baskervilles. Found via @hinxminx and @alyssaharad on Twitter.
I confess to being baffled by this. Does Doyle mean that in his time, there are seventy-five compounded, commercially available perfumes? Because even in 1901, when the book was written, there must have been more than that available in England (presumably quite a few imported from France and Italy). He surely can’t mean that there are only seventy-five components to scents, of which one is white jasmine, because again, there were many more than that by 1900. “Perfume: The Story of a Murderer”, set in mid-eighteenth-century France, makes it clear that even then there would have been a whole lot more than seventy-five of either.
Or am I misreading the restrictive clause, with Doyle actually saying that there are seventy-five perfumes which the detective must identify, the rest being unimportant?
I’m really confused!
No idea, and there is nothing in the surrounding text to elucidate.
I think it’s just Conan Doyle trying to establish his sleuth’s uncanny thoroughness and intellect, without bothering to do research into whether his claim is true. It was a lot harder back then before the Internet to get this kind of info!
Quite possibly.
I adore Conan Doyle, but this may not be Holmes’ most trenchant analysis! You know the drill… when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever….