ds for fabulous ravishers, and to cry out that
they have been stabbed with hypodermic needles in cinema theatres, and
to watch furtively for white slavers in railroad stations. It is thus,
indeed, that the whole white-slave mountebankery has been launched,
with its gaudy fictions and preposterous alarms. And it is thus, more
importantly, that whole regiments of neurotic wives have been convinced
that their children are monuments, not to a co-operation in which their
own share was innocent and cordial, but to the solitary libidinousness
of their swinish and unconscionable husbands.

Dr. Gamble, of course, is speaking of the lower fauna in the time of
Noah. A literal application of her theory toman today is enough to bring
it to a reductio ad absurdum. Which sex of Homo sapiens actually does
the primping and parading that she describes? Which runs to "beautiful
coloring," sartorial, hirsute, facial? Which encases itself in vestments
which "serve no other useful purpose than to aid in securing the
favours" of the other? The insecurity of the gifted savante's position
is at once apparent. The more convincingly she argues that the primeval
mud-hens and she mackerel had to be anesthetized with spectacular
decorations in order to "endure the caresses" of their beaux, the more
she supports the thesis that men have to be decoyed and bamboozled into
love today. In other words, her argument turns upon and destroys itself.
Carried to its last implication, it holds that women are all Donna
Juanitas, and that if they put off their millinery and cosmetics, and
abandoned the shameless sexual allurements of their scanty dress, men
could not "endure their caresses."

To be sure, Dr. Gamble by no means draws this disconcerting conclusion
herself. To the contrary, she clings to the conventional theory that the
human female of today is no more than the plaything of the concupiscent
male, and that she must wait for the feminist millenium to set her
free from his abominable pawings. But she can reach this notion only
by standing her whole structure of reasoning on its head--in fact, by
knocking it over and repudiating it. On the one hand, she argues that
splendour of attire is merely a bait to overcome the reluctance of
the opposite sex, and on the other hand she argues, at least by fair
inference, that it is not. This grotesque switching of horses, however,
need not detain us. The facts are too plain to be disposed of by a lady
anthropo