164 READINGS IN BIOLOGICAL SCIENCE 



they can surely convince themselves of the facts by a visit to almost any 

 clinic in the land, mental, surgical or medical. 



Very often of late, our colleges and universities have come in for a 

 scoring at the hands of some excitable individual who, having taken pen 

 in hand and sex in mind, with the aid of a little fact and much fiction, paints 

 a lurid picture of his inner convictions. In his mind, coeducation has be- 

 come wholly coo-education, and he lays himself out in a heart-rending 

 account of how terrible the struggles of the male student are along the 

 thorny path of learning with a bare-kneed "babe," all waved and scented, 

 as his traveling companion. How much the wish is father to the thought 

 in such ebullitions it's difficult to say, but such writers forget that the pres- 

 ent generation boys have grown up with the bare-kneed sisters, mothers, 

 cousins, and aunts, to say nothing of grandmothers, and that as a result, 

 to them, unlike their palpitating mentors, bare knees are no longer "a treat." 



Virtue is a matter of purity of heart rather than of the conventional 

 outlook of a particular age or people on the externals of life. As regards 

 dress, to put it bluntly, girls of the present time are probably less alluring 

 and therefore less dangerous to the weaklings among men than in earlier 

 days because there is little mystery left about them. The human mind is 

 so constituted that it is fascinated by mystery. The half-revealing, half- 

 concealing garments of former days were unquestionably more provoca- 

 tive to the imagination, and in matters of sex it is imaginative stimulus that 

 makes behavior run riot rather than the bold facts of anatomy. Our modern 

 woman's dress certainly leaves little or nothing for the imagination to 

 play around, and from the standpoint of morals it is probably better so. 

 Since chance revelation of the feminine form has ceased to be an excitant 

 to the masculine eye the whole situation makes for a more wholesome 

 attitude between the sexes. 



For some years the problem seems to have revolved around the question 

 of to skirt or not to skirt — the amount of leg to expose. In earlier days, 

 as revealed in English poetry at least, it was apparently the breasts that 

 received most attention. Thus, we find such amorous clerics as the bachelor 

 poet Herrick rhapsodizing about this or that or the other detail of his 

 "Julia's breasts," and even such masters as the great Shakespeare himself 

 enthusing over: 



Her breasts, like ivory globes circled with blue, 

 A pair of maiden worlds unconquered. 



Whatever may have been the beauteous type of the poet's dream — and 

 perhaps it was mainly a dream — in the give and take of everyday living it 

 is probably more wholesome for man to think of these necessary mamma- 

 lian accessories in terms of their nutritive rather than their ornamental 

 functions. Here, too, with the passing of mystery, indecorous fancies 

 vanish, 



J 



