For Johnson, the “nose of the mind” can be understood as closely connected to a notion of the mind’s nose—in other words, the osmology or scent-connotations insofar as we can recover them. As I have argued elsewhere, the level to which that ambition is achievable is low. That said, in this essay I explore a few ways we can examine the work of Johnson and his circle for signs of Johnson’s olfactory reality, and how Johnson uses—and suppresses—olfactory data in his own work. Through an examination of what we know of Johnson’s conversation through the biographies, as well as his own writing, we can see the variety of ways that smell language was deployed in eighteenth-century culture.