What is Soap?
In one way or another, every individual in the United States uses up about 28 pounds of soap a year! About 4 billion pounds of soap are manufactured in this country annually. Yet only a hundred years ago, nearly all the soap was made at home. You can imagine how little this homemade soap resembled the neat, sweet-smelling cakes found everywhere today.

Soap is made by boiling fats and oils with an alkali. The fats can be animal tallows and greases and the oils are obtained from seeds of fruits and plants. Usually these oils come from the palm, coconut, and olive trees.

The other ingredients of soap, known as alkalies, are soda and potash. Soda is used in making hard soaps, such as laundry and toilet bars and flakes and granulated soaps. Potash is used to make the paste or liquid types of soaps.

The process of making soap begins by boiling the fats and alkalies in huge kettles. Some of the kettles are large enough to hold 175 tons. This process is called saponification. When it is nearly finished, salt is added. This causes the soap to rise to the top of the kettle. The brine, or salt solution, sinks to the bottom and is drawn off. This process may be repeated five or six times until the last bit of fat is saponified, or made into soap.

From the kettle, the semiliquid soap goes into a machine where it is churned into a smooth mass. At this time, various other ingredients are added to give the soap special qualities. For instance, a perfume may be added, or coloring matter, a water softener, and a preservative. If a floating soap is wanted, the churning process, called "crutching" is continued for a longer time. Air is also beaten into the soap to make it lighter.

Now the hot melted soap is ready to be made into bars or cakes, or to be turned out as granules, flakes, or globules. There are special processes for making each of these forms of soap.

The art of soapmaking disappeared for nearly 1,000 years, and was finally revived in France and in Italy. In fact, the French word "savon," meaning soap, comes from the name of an Italian city, Savona, which revived the art of soapmaking!

Head Lice
There are three types of louse or pediculus which may infest the human body, namely, the head, the body and the crab louse. The last is usually found in the pubic area, but may spread to other hairy parts of the body. Their presence cause itching and scratching with resulting sores which are apt to become pustular. Patches of eczema or dermatitis may also arise. Apart from this local skin disorder, the chief indictment against the louse is its danger as a disease carrier. Typhus, or "jail fever " as it was called for many years in this country, is definitely known to be transmitted by the louse, not only directly by its bite, but by its excrement also, if rubbed into an abrasion of the skin. Two other diseases can be transmitted by these insects—relapsing fever and trench fever. The latter caused an enormous amount of sickness amongst our armies during the first World War. The disease is intensely infective, it being possible for a person to become infected by receiving excremental dust on the eye membranes.

The germs of bubonic plague have been found in lice feeding on plague patients. Life History. The development of the louse is limited to two stages only (the egg and the adult) metamorphosis, then, being said to be incomplete. The egg, or nit, which is plainly visible, is attached by a cement-like substance, towards one end, to a hair of the head, body, or of the clothing. On the latter the most common sites are beneath the seams and at the neck and wrist-bands. Up to 260 eggs may be laid by one female at the rate of eight to twelve a day. With moderate warmth they hatch in from seven to ten days. The emerging adult is not full-grown for a further eleven days, during which it moults three times, and the female may commence to lay eggs the following day. The length of life is from three to five weeks— exceptionally it may attain to forty-five days—the insect feeding on blood, which it does twice daily.

The presence of lice can be easily detected, either by seeing the lice themselves or their nits affixed to hairs. The age of a nit on the head can be roughly estimated by its position on the hair if we remember that when laid it was affixed to the base of the hair. If then, the nit is some way along the hair, we can safely say that it is some days old and probably about to hatch if it has not already done so.

Cosmetics
The word is applied to preparations used for improving the appearance of the skin, or for emphasising the features of the face or the shape of the finger-tips. Jars and bottles for containing cosmetics and implements for applying them have been found among the remains of all the ancient civilisations. Face powder, made of powdered rice or semolina, or of chemical compounds, has been widely used for giving a matt surface to the skin, and recently pastes mixed with gum have been used for the same purpose.

Kohl is used for shading the eyelids in order to make the eyes appear bigger; henna for staining hair, finger-tips and toes. Rouge powder or paste is used by women for colouring the cheeks, and at some periods has also been worn by men. The second decade of the 20th century, which saw the widespread emancipation of women, saw also a great increase in the use of cosmetics, especially sticks of rouge-paste—lipsticks—for reddening the lips, and varnish for reddening the finger-nails and toe-nails. Cosmetics have always been used by actors and actresses to give a different character to the face, or to counteract the effect of strong lights, which deaden the look of the skin, and to help the features and facial expression to be visible from a dis­tance.

Cosmetics are also used in an attempt to clean the skin and keep it flexible and unwrinkled. The skin is well supplied with blood vessels, from which it derives its nutrition. It is impervious to most compounds and there is no evidence that cosmetics applied to its surface 'feed' the skin. However, application of emollient creams and moisturisers helps prevent premature ageing of the skin in that they minimise water loss. Loss of intrinsic water from the skin either through exposure to wind, sun, or high temperature and low humidity will accelerate ageing and the formation of wrinkles. The wide use of lipsticks has led to a decrease in cracked and chapped lips. In some people, certain cosmetics, such as hair preparations and depilatories may cause a severe skin irritation. Hence before using a new cosmetic it should always be tested on a small area of the arm.

Cleopatra
Cleopatra has profoundly stirred the imaginations of writers and scholars. This queen- vital, tireless, subtly intelligent, ruthlessly ambitious, ensnarer of two great Roman generals-attracts hyperbole. In Rome the stories about her exploits excited loathing and terror. She formed a subject for the contemporary poets Horace (Odes; Epodes) and Virgil (Eclogues'). Unfortunately, the earliest historical accounts that have been preserved are those of Appian (Bella, civilia) and Plutarch (Lives, chiefly Antony), written about a century after her death. She is mentioned by Ovid, Lucian, and Pliny. Strabo, Josephus, and Dio Cassius provide some of the elements of her legend.

The early historical sources are in the main unsympathetic to Cleopatra, for they are based on Roman presentations of the case, and Rome had nearly been defeated by this woman. Plutarch's account is the most complete, and it served as the basis for Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra. (In Notes to Caesar and Cleopatra, George Bernard Shaw excused his play Caesar and Cleopatra from any attempt at delineating historically true personalities.) With fresh evaluation of old sources and the use of evidence hitherto unrecognized, the historian W. W. Tarn has written eloquently in Cleopatra's defense (The Cambridge Ancient History, vol. 10, chapters 2 and 3).

The popular 20th century image of Cleopatra as a sex-mad siren is due to ignorance. The stories of her sexual exploits, aside from the liaisons with Caesar and Antony, were almost certainly fabricated as part of the propaganda campaign to discredit Antony. (Tarn has called attention to the fact that the outrageously exaggerated charges and countercharges in this propaganda campaign were accepted as fact by the Classical historians and have distorted our picture of Roman history every since.) In her relationships with the two great generals, Cleopatra used her body as well as her mind to achieve political ends. Her standards of conduct differed widely from Roman custom and law and are generally repugnant to present-day Europeans and Americans, so largely the heirs of Rome. But it was for her determination and intelligence that she was feared at Rome, and Cleopatra deserves to be remembered as a nearly successful contender for control of the Hellenistic world.

Vice President of the USA
The Vice-President is usually chosen, like the President, in a nationwide election. However, With a few notable exceptions the Vice-Presidency has been occupied by relatively obscure politicians, particularly since the adoption of the 12th Amendment to the Constitution.

If the president dies, resigns, or is removed from office, the vice president succeeds him. The vice president may also serve temporarily as acting president if the president, for whatever reason, is unable to discharge his duties. Like the president, the vice president must be at least 35 years old.

A Vice-President's influence within the government is largely determined by the President.