We have for so long trained ourselves to the half expressed belief that there is something wrong about nudity that we find women’s clubs draping statues, and organizations rejecting figures because they are nude, which all ages and all civilized peoples have accepted as pure and chaste works of art. I would not for a moment have it thought that I approve of all nude statues or pictures. Many of them have no virtue to commend them. Yet I would not indiscriminately condemn all works of art in the nude merely because they are nude. We have forgotten the appearance of a healthy body, and feel ashamed to see one. By our mental attitude we accuse the Creator of indecency that “male and female created He them,” for, not only do we veil the bodies of the opposite sexes from each other, (which is a perfectly correct and wise thing to do) but daughters are ashamed to be seen nude by their own mothers, and mothers by their daughters. I believe in the sanctity of nudity. Let the sexes remain apart, by all means, but let there be less of false shame when men see nude men, or women see nude women, or either or both see nude children. It is a fact declared by the most conservative of white explorers, that the naked tribes of aborigines are the most pure, chaste, and truly modest. Our conception that because Indians are unclothed they are therefore indecent and unclean, impure and unchaste, is a dirty conception, dishonoring to ourselves and our Creator. _Honi soit qui mal y pense_, and “to the pure all things are pure” are as true to-day as when they were first spoken and written, and while I am as opposed as is any one living to nude pictures and statues that have nothing to commend them but their nudity; while I am strongly opposed to promiscuous nudity either in whole or in part, I am equally opposed to the mental attitude that nudity in itself is wrong, and that the Creator did not know His business when he created us both nude and of different sexes. [Illustration: A HAVASUPAI CHILD BROUGHT UP TO ENJOY BEING OUT IN THE RAIN.] Benjamin Franklin, John Quincy Adams, and many others of the great men of the world, made it a daily practice to expose their bodies to the sun and the air. For years I have seized every proper opportunity to do so, such as when I took my fifteen days’ rowing trip down the Colorado River. When on the Salton Sea exploring trip; when out in the deserts, the canyons, the forests, on the mountain tops, I endeavored every day to give my body some exposure, and every night and morning, when camping out, before retiring and arising, I have a brief air bath, sometimes with vigorous physical exercises. Thus the power of God’s own sun and air enter my body through every pore of the skin, and I enjoy a health, vigor, vim, and tingle of delight I can get in no other way.