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 depend