A biochemist loved a maid
In pure actinic ways;
The enzymes of affection made
A ferment of his days.
The waves emergent from her eyes
Set symphonies afloat,
These undulations simply struck
His fundamental note.
No longer could he hide his love,
Nor cultures could he make,
And so he screwed his courage up,
And thus to her he spake:
"Oh, maid of undulations sweet,
Inoculate my veins,
And fill my thirsty arteries up
With amorous ptomaines.
"In vain I try to break this thrall,
In vain my reason fights,
My inner self tempestuous teems
With microcosmic mites.
"I cannot offer you a crown
Of gold—I cannot tell
Of terrapin or wine for us,
But rations balanced well.
"A little fat just now and then,
Some carbohydrates sweet,
And gluten in the bakers' bread,
Are what we'll have to eat.
"The days will pass in rapture by,
With antitoxine frills,
And on our Guinea-pigs we'll try
The cures for all our ills.
"O! maiden fair, wilt thou be mine?
Come, give me but one kiss,
And dwell forever blessed with me.
In symbiotic bliss."
This maiden, modest, up-to-date,
Eschewed domestic strife;
In mocking accents she replied,
"Wat t'ell—not on your life."
The philosopher and the theologian pretend to understand the origin of things and the foundation of ethics, but what one of them ever had the least idea of how love first started? What one of them can tell you a thing concerning the original osculation—that primary amatory congress which was the beginning of the beginning?—
Bathed in Bathybian bliss
And sunk in the slush of the sea,
Thrilled the first molecular kiss,
The beginning of you and of me.
The Atom of Oxygen blushed
When it felt fair Hydrogen's breath,
The Atom of Nitrogen rushed
Eager to Life out of Death.
Through Ocean's murmuring dell
Ran a whisper of rapture Elysian;
Across that Bathybian jell
Ran a crack that whispered of fission.
Alas! that such things should be,
That cruel unkind separation,
Adown in the depths of the sea
Should follow the first osculation.
O tender lover and miss,
You cannot remember too well
That the first molecular kiss
Was the first Bathybian sell.
Not only are women rapidly invading the domain of chemistry, but they are also the yellow peril of her sister science, pharmacy. A drug-store without a dimpled damsel is now a fit subject for the sheriff's hammer.—
There in the corner pharmacy,
This lithesome lady lingers,
And potent pills and philters true
Are fashioned by her fingers.
Her phiz behind the soda fount
May oft be seen in summer;
How sweetly foams the soda fizz,
When you receive it from her.
While mixing belladonna drops
With tincture of lobelia,
And putting up prescriptions, she
Is fairer than Ophelia.
Each poison has its proper place,
Each potion in its chalice;
Her dædal fingers are so deft,
They call her digit-Alice.
Love has been the theme of every age and of every tongue. It is the test of youth and of the capability of progress. So long as a man can and does love, he is young and there is hope for him. Whoever saw a satisfactory definition of love? No one, simply because the science of physical chemistry is yet young, and it is only when moulded by the principles of that science that the definition is complete and intelligible. Love is the synchronous vibration of two cardiac cells, both of which, were it not for the ethics of etymology, should begin with an S. Love is the source of eternal youth, of senile recrudescence. It is the philosopher's stone, the elixir of life, the fountain of flowers. So love changes not—the particular object is not of much importance. One should never be a bigot in anything and a wise man changes often.
The grade of civilization which a nation has reached may be safely measured by three things. If you want me to tell you where to place a nation in the scale, don't tell me the name of it, nor the country it inhabits, nor the religion it professes, nor its form of government. Let me know how much sugar it uses per head, what the consumption of soap is, and whether its women have the same rights as its men. That nation which eats the most sugar, uses the most soap, and regards its women as having the same rights as its men, will always be at the top. And nowhere else in the world is more sugar eaten, more soap used, and women more fully admitted to all the rights of men than in our own United States and in the American Chemical Society.
To the chemist, as well as to other scientific men, woman is not only real but also ideal. From the fragments of the real the ideal is reconstructed. This ideal is a trinity, a trinity innominate and incorporeal. She is Pallas, Aphrodite, Artemis, three in one. She is an incognita and an amorph. I know full well I shall not meet her; neither in the crowded street of the metropolis nor in the quiet lane of the country. I know well I shall not find her in the salon of fashion, nor as a shepherdess with her crook upon the mountain-side. I know full well that I need not seek her in the bustling tide of travel, nor wandering by the shady banks of a brook. She is indeed near to my imagination, but far, infinitely far, beyond my reach. Nevertheless, I may attempt to describe her as she appears to me. Let me begin with that part of my ideal which has been inherited from Diana. My ideal woman has a sound body. She has bone, not brittle sticks of phosphate of lime. She has muscles, not flabby, slender ribbons of empty sarcolemma. She has blood, not a thin leucocytic ichor. I have no sympathy with that pseudo-civilization which apparently has for its object the destruction of the human race by the production of a race of bodiless women. If I am to be a pessimist, I will be one out and out, and seek to destroy the race in a high-handed and manly way. Indoor life, inactivity, lack of oxygen in the lungs, these are things which in time produce a white skin, but do it by sacrificing every other attribute of beauty.
In the second place, my ideal woman is beautiful. I will confess that I do not know what I mean by this; for what is beauty? It is both subjective and objective. It depends on taste and education. It has something to do with habit and experience. I know I shall not be able to describe this trait, yet when I look up into her eyes—eyes, remember, which are mere fictions of my imagination—when I look into her face, when I see her move so statelily into my presence, I recognize there that portion of her which she has inherited from the Aphrodite of other days; and this I know is beauty. It is not the beauty of an hallucination, the halo which a heart diseased casts about the head of its idol. It is the beauty which is seen by a sober second thought, a beauty which does not so much dazzle as it delights; a beauty which does not fade with the passing hour, but stays through the heat and burden of the day and until the day is done.
The beauty which my ideal woman inherited from Aphrodite is not a fading one. It is not simply a youthful freshness which the first decade of womanhood will wither. It is a beauty which abides; it is a beauty in which the charm of seventeen becomes a real essence of seventy; it is a beauty which is not produced by any artificial pose of the head or by any possible banging of the hair; it is a beauty which the art of dressing may adorn but can never create; it is a beauty which does not overwhelm the heart like an avalanche, but which eats it slowly but surely away as a trickling stream cuts and grooves the solid granite.