A dog-eared page from Diane Ackerman's " A Natural History of the Senses"

The Ocean Inside Us 

Our sense of smell, like so many of our other body functions, is a throwback to that time, early in evolution, when we thrived in the oceans. An odor must first dissolve into a watery solution our mucous membranes can absorb before we can smell it. Scuba-diving in the Bahamas some years ago, I became aware of two things for the first time: that we carry the ocean within us; that our veins mirror the tides. As a human woman, with ovaries where eggs lie like roe, entering the smooth, undulating womb of the ocean from which our ancestors evolved millennia ago, I was so moved my eyes teared underwater, and I mixed my saltiness with the ocean's. Distracted by such thoughts, I looked around to find my position vis-a-vis the boat, and couldn't. But it didn't matter: Home was everywhere.

That moment of mysticism left my sinuses full, and made surfacing painful until I removed my mask, blew my nose in a strange two-stage snite, and settled down emotionally. But I've never forgotten that sense of belonging. Our blood is mainly salt water, we still require a saline solution (salt water) to wash our eyes or put in contact lenses, and through the ages women's vaginas have been described as smelling "fishy." In fact, Sandor Ferenczi, a disciple of Freud's, went so far as to declare, in Thalassa: A Theory of Genitality, that men only make love to women because women's wombs smell of herring brine, and men are trying to get back to the primordial ocean -- surely one of the more remarkable theories on the subject. He didn't offer an explanation for why women have intercourse with men. One researcher claims that this "fishiness" is due not to anything intrinsic to the vagina, but rather to poor hygiene after intercourse, or vaginitis, or stale sperm. "If you deposit semen in the vagina and leave it there, it comes out smelling fishy," he argues. This has a certain etymological persuasiveness to it, if we remember that in many European languages the slang names for prostitutes are variations on the Indo-European root pu, to decay or rot. In French, putain; to the Irish, old put; in Italian putto; puta in both Spanish and Portuguese. Cognate words are putrid, pus, suppurate, and putorius (referring to the skunk family). Skunk derives from the Algonquin Indian word for polecat; and during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in England polecat was a derogatory term for prostitute. Not only do we owe our sense of smell and taste to the ocean, but we smell and taste of the ocean.

 got this from 

http://www.american-buddha.com/lit.naturalhistsenses.smell.htm