We do not know why it is so.  Zinc and aluminum are metals very much like iron in chemical properties, but all their salts are colorless.  Why is it that the most useful of the metals forms the most beautiful compounds?  Some say, Providence; some say, chance; some say nothing.  But if it had not been so we would have lost most of the beauty of rocks and trees and human beings.  For the leaves and the flowers would all be white, and all the men and women would look like walking corpses.  Without color in the flower what would the bees and painters do?  If all the grass and trees were white, it would be like winter all the year round.  If we had white blood in our veins like some of the insects it would be hard lines for our poets.  And what would become of our morality if we could not blush?

  “As for me, I thrill to see
    The bloom a velvet cheek discloses! 
  Made of dust!  I well believe it,
    So are lilies, so are roses.”

An etiolated earth would be hardly worth living in.

The chlorophyll of the leaves and the hemoglobin of the blood are similar in constitution.  Chlorophyll contains magnesium in place of iron but iron is necessary to its formation.  We all know how pale a plant gets if its soil is short of iron.  It is the iron in the leaves that enables the plants to store up the energy of the sunshine for their own use and ours.  It is the iron in our blood that enables us to get the iron out of iron rust and make it into machines to supplement our feeble hands.  Iron is for us internally the carrier of energy, just as in the form of a trolley wire or of a third rail it conveys power to the electric car.  Withdraw the iron from the blood as indicated by the pallor of the cheeks, and we become weak, faint and finally die.  If the amount of iron in the blood gets too small the disease germs that are always attacking us are no longer destroyed, but multiply without check and conquer us.  When the iron ceases to work efficiently we are killed by the poison we ourselves generate.

Counting the number of iron-bearing corpuscles in the blood is now a common method of determining disease.  It might also be useful in moral diagnosis.  A microscopical and chemical laboratory attached to the courtroom would give information of more value than some of the evidence now obtained.  For the anemic and the florid vices need very different treatment.  An excess or a deficiency of iron in the body is liable to result in criminality.  A chemical system of morals might be developed on this basis.  Among the ferruginous sins would be placed murder, violence and licentiousness.  Among the non-ferruginous, cowardice, sloth and lying.  The former would be mostly sins of commission, the latter, sins of omission.  The virtues could, of course, be similarly classified; the ferruginous virtues would include courage, self-reliance and hopefulness; the non-ferruginous, peaceableness, meekness and chastity.  According to this ethical criterion the moral man would be defined as one whose conduct is better than we should expect from the per cent. of iron in his blood.