Jacobson's Organ and the Remarkable Nature of Smell

Natural History, April, 2000

Jacobson's Organ and the Remarkable Nature of Smell, by Lyall Watson (W. W. Norton, 2000; $24.95; 256 pp.)

Most of us know that smells are picked up by the nose, relayed to the brain's olfactory bulbs, and translated as, say, a whiff of perfume, or the stink of skunk. Few know about the transmission of subtler sexual, pheromonal, and other chemical odors via the vomeronasal organ, or Jacobson's organ (named after the Danish anatomist who discovered it in 1809), to an entirely different part of the brain--the hypothalamus. Science writer Watson explores the scent-sensing mechanisms that have evolved not just in humans but throughout the animal kingdom.