The modern chemist has robbed royalty of its most distinctive insignia, Tyrian purple. In ancient times to be "porphyrogene," that is "born to the purple," was like admission to the Almanach de Gotha at the present time, for only princes or their wealthy rivals could afford to pay $600 a pound for crimsoned linen. The precious dye is secreted by a snail-like shellfish of the eastern coast of the Mediterranean. From a tiny sac behind the head a drop of thick whitish liquid, smelling like garlic, can be extracted. If this is spread upon cloth of any kind and exposed to air and sunlight it turns first green, next blue and then purple. If the cloth is washed with soap--that is, set by alkali--it becomes a fast crimson, such as Catholic cardinals still wear as princes of the church. The Phoenician merchants made fortunes out of their monopoly, but after the fall of Tyre it became one of "the lost arts"--and accordingly considered by those whose faces are set toward the past as much more wonderful than any of the new arts. But in 1909 Friedlander put an end to the superstition by analyzing Tyrian purple and finding that it was already known. It was the same as a dye that had been prepared five years before by Sachs but had not come into commercial use because of its inferiority to others in the market. It required 12,000 of the mollusks to supply the little material needed for analysis, but once the chemist had identified it he did not need to bother the Murex further, for he could make it by the ton if he had wanted to. The coloring principle turned out to be a di-brom indigo, that is the same as the substance extracted from the Indian plant, but with the addition of two atoms of bromine. Why a particular kind of a shellfish should have got the habit of extracting this rare element from sea water and stowing it away in this peculiar form is "one of those things no fellow can find out." But according to the chemist the Murex mollusk made a mistake in hitching the bromine to the wrong carbon atoms. He finds as he would word it that the 6:6' di-brom indigo secreted by the shellfish is not so good as the 5:5' di-brom indigo now manufactured at a cheap rate and in unlimited quantity. But we must not expect too much of a mollusk's mind. In their cheapness lies the offense of the aniline dyes in the minds of some people. Our modern aristocrats would delight to be entitled "porphyrogeniti" and to wear exclusive gowns of "purple and scarlet from the isles of Elishah" as was done in Ezekiel's time, but when any shopgirl or sailor can wear the royal color it spoils its beauty in their eyes. Applied science accomplishes a real democracy such as legislation has ever failed to establish.