MR. PRESIDENT AND FELLOW-MEMBERS OF THE CHEMICAL SOCIETY:—­I propose to introduce an innovation to after-dinner speaking and stick to my text.  In my opinion, it is too late in the day to question the Creator’s purpose in making Woman.  She is an accomplished fact!  She is here!  She has come to stay, and we might as well accept her.  She has broken into our Society, which, until within a year or two, has remained entirely masculine.  She has not yet appeared at our annual dinners, but I am a false prophet if she be not here to speak for herself ere long.  And why not?  Chemistry is well suited to engage the attention of the feminine mind.  The jewels woman wears, the paints she uses, the hydrogen peroxide with which she blondines her hair are all children of chemistry.  The prejudice against female chemists is purely selfish and unworthy of a great mind.  There is only enough work in the world to keep half of humanity busy.  Every time a woman gets employment a man must go idle.  But if the woman will only marry the man, all will be forgiven.

I think I know why you have called on an old bachelor to respond to this toast.  A married man could not.  He would be afraid to give his fancies full rein.  Someone might tell his wife.  A young man could see only one side of the subject—­the side his sweetheart is on.  But the old bachelor fears no Caudle lecture, and is free from any romantic bias.  He sees things just as they are.  If he be also a true chemist, lovely woman appeals to him in a truly scientific way.  Her charms appear to him in the crucible and the beaker: 

  I know a maiden, charming and true,
  With beautiful eyes like the cobalt blue
  Of the borax bead, and I guess she’ll do
      If she hasn’t another reaction.

  Her form is no bundle of toilet shams,
  Her beauty no boon of arsenical balms,
  And she weighs just sixty-two kilograms
      To a deci-decimal fraction.

  Her hair is a crown, I can truthfully state
  ’Tis a metre long, nor curly nor straight,
  And it is as yellow as plumbic chromate
      In a slightly acid solution.

  And when she speaks from parlor or stump,
  The words which gracefully gambol and jump
  Sound sweet like the water in Sprengel’s pump
      In magnesic phosphate ablution.

  I have bought me a lot, about a hectare,
  And have built me a house ten metres square,
  And soon, I think, I shall take her there,
      My tart little acid radicle.

  Perhaps little sailors on life’s deep sea
  Will be the salts of this chemistry,
  And the lisp of the infantile A, B, C
      Be the refrain of this madrigal.

No one but a scientific man can have any idea of the real nature of love.  The poet may dream, the novelist describe the familiar feeling, but only the chemist knows just how it is: 

  A biochemist loved a maid
    In pure actinic ways;
  The enzymes of affection made
    A ferment of his days.