l6o READINGS IN BIOLOGICAL SCIENCE 



can't look at a monkey paperweight without wondering whether it's a 

 he or she^ and who, if they heard the name used, would suspect the sextant 

 of being an instrument invented by some Nevada judge to measure sex 

 appeal, but such persons are decidedly in the minorit}'. 



Of course our young folks are sexy, as their parents, and their parents' 

 parents were before them, clear back to the primeval protoplasm of 

 creation's dawn, and also, of course, most of them have the same average 

 intelligence, capacity for necessary inhibition and common sense that 

 their parents had, and they will act, therefore, in much the same way, 

 including worrying over the rising generation. They may be a bit intox- 

 icated at present but surely will come the morning after when they will 

 sober down to the headache and the hard office chair. 



Our young sophisticates profess to laugh at what they consider the 

 sentimentality of the past generation, but oh, who of us have not by some 

 misfortune been compelled to listen to their favorite songs which palpitate 

 over the radio! Those about some black or other hued "mamma," about 

 dancing with tear-stained eyes and love-anguished hearts, about their 

 "blues," their sighs and their various other emotional gripings, about the 

 little lovenests for two-oo-oo-oo, ad nauseam, until to the Mid- Victorian 

 "sentimentahst" it all becomes excruciatingly funny when not too bore- 

 some. 



Not sentimental? Come to any one of the campuses of our larger coed- 

 ucational institutions and gaze at the throngs of ambulant adolescents, with 

 here and there and everywhere, soulful males and sighful females stroll- 

 ing hand-in-hand from class to class; any observer can see the humor of 

 the situation even though the performers do not. True, such displays are 

 staged mainly by traditionless youths from our larger cities, but individuals 

 of this type have swarmed into our colleges in such numbers in recent 

 years as almost wholly to eclipse the former college cHentele from homes 

 of refinement where good taste, delicacy of feehng and a sense of propriety 

 were not scorned as reprehensible repressions. 



And then, take what our young sophisticates call music — jazz or swing 

 — a series of constipated, strangling sounds emitted in a skip-stop rhythm 

 which goes over and over and over the same inane Uttle theme, made 

 harsh by occasional clanging discords — apparently a sort of sauce pi- 

 qiiante to the ears of modern youth. Where a solo effect is introduced it is 

 usually given to that orchestral bastard of reed and brass, the saxophone, 

 whose every tone reveals its illegitimate origin. 



What most people fail to realize is that sex is so universal in nature, and 

 therefore so commonplace as to be nothing unique, startling or all-absorb- 

 ing. One finds sex shadowed forth in the first dim gropings of the lowliest 

 living matter. The amours of the protozoa may not seem to promise much 

 as portraiture of modern sex appeal, but sex in the making is there, never- 

 theless. One can trace its course upward through worm, fish, fowl and 



