If you were suddenly asked, by way of a mental test, what particular thing or person was most closely associated in your mind with the word strong, you would probably say a giant or an ox unless you had been listening to a sermon whose text was the sixteenth chapter of Judges, thirtieth verse, in which case you would be more likely to say Samson, but the typical example of physical strength, would hardly be an Onion.

And yet the Onion, although, like the proverbial Prophet, it may be without honor among its fellow vegetables, is regarded by at least one human outsider as the giant and ox and Samson combined of the vegetable world.

Whatever your gastronomic leanings may be, let you not be tempted to think lightly of the Onion.

Though its name be unhallowed when it appears in vulgar consort with Tripe, and its reek abhorrent in the habitations of the lowly, though it be viewed with contempt as a poor relation by its kinsman the lily, the Onion has a glorious past; it has a record of achievement that is second to none; it was, as I shall presently show, chiefly due to the strength of Onions that at least one of the great Egyptian Pyramids owed its existence. Even Samson might envy the record of the Onion!

When I tell you that the Pyramids of Egypt, at any rate one of them, was built by sheer vegetable strength, you may not believe me, but perhaps you may believe the historian Herodotus.

Herodotus found engraved on one of the Pyramids a complete record of the exact number of onions, radishes and leeks supplied and consumed by the workmen who piled its monstrous stones one upon the other.[1]

And how were the Pyramids erected? By some forgotten mechanical farce? No.

According to the late Cope Whitehouse, Engineer and Egyptologist, the Pyramids were built from the apex downward over the conical hills that abound in the locality, the interior of the hill being afterwards dug away to form chambers and galleries. All of which was accomplished by the unaided physical power of human muscles and sinews.

And whence came this power?

It was derived mainly from the vegetable energy of Onions, leeks and radishes transmuted by the chemistry of digestion and assimilation to the muscles and sinews of the slaves employed in building the Pyramid.

Furthermore, Herodotus tells us that with the engraved record of the onions, leeks and radishes consumed by the slaves, was also the computation of their cost which amounted to 1,600 talents of silver, this being the total cost of the vegetable fuel for operating the human machinery employed in the construction of the Pyramid.

And now let me ask you—what it is, this thing we call Scent, this mysterious emanation which is the Love Message of the Rose, the Call of the Sea, the Strength of the Onion?

You don’t know? Neither do I, no more does anybody.

Of all the five recording faculties which we human creatures share with other animals, the sense of Smell is the most elusive, the most penetrating. It apprises us of impending peril when all our other wires of sensation are “busy” or “out of order” and incapable of giving us warning. It has the mysterious power of reproducing through the “flash back” we call memory the forgotten records of all of the other four sense-films, and yet the scientists who can tell us all about light waves and sound waves, and even make pictures of them, have very little to say about the movement of the invisible bodies whose impact upon our consciousness produces the sensation of smell.

The terrific scent-energy hurled forth from the seemingly inexhaustible storage battery of an Onion or a Tuberose is more of a mystery to our men of science than is the composition of the crooked light waves from the planet Mars or the height of the flames of the Corona, measured in a solar eclipse.

Even Dr. Einstein, to whom the movements of the heavenly bodies are as simple as is a game of baseball to the average intellect, cannot tell us whether the scent-atoms hurled from the Onion rush forth in an impeccable tangent or are pitched in a hyperbolic curve.