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 daedal 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