Refrigeration is Nature's specific for the cure of germ-diseases, and the tardy recognition of that truth is certainly not justified by the lack of suggestive facts.

   The first November frosts abate climatic fevers throughout the lowlands of the temperate zone. In the marshes of the Mississippi Valley agues that defy the remedies of the drug-store yield to the expurgative influence of a blizzard. North winds, reducing the temperature of the dog-days some forty degrees in as many minutes, bring a new lease of life to thousands of slum-tenants, to victims of chronic headaches, to infants exhausted by confinement in the sweltering atmosphere of city tenements. Refugees from cholera epidemics venture to return with the snowbirds.

   And it is no accident that nine out of ten international wars ended with the victory of Northland tribes over their Southern neighbors. Egypt and Persia vanquished by Greeks, Greece by Romans, Rome by the barbarians of the Teutonic forests, South-German Austria by North-German Prussians, Southern Russia by the descendants of Rurik, Southern Italy by Savoy, South-Spanish Moors by North-Spanish Goths, Dixie by Yankeeland, South Mongol China by North-Mongol Japan. Highlanders, the world over, boast their superior vigor and longevity.

   Physiology explains those facts and confirms the claim of the hydropathist Schrodt that refrigeration is one of the few natural tonics, stimulating the activity of the organic functions without the risk of deleterious after-effects. A cold bath and a current of cold air accelerate the pulse and the process of respiration. The gasps resulting from a cold plunge-bath indicate the effort of Nature to restore the proper degree of animal warmth by setting the calorific apparatus to work under high pressure.

   A dose of drastic drugs, e.g., alcohol in its concentrated forms, accomplish a similar result with almost equal promptness, the organism labors with feverish activity to rid itself of a life-endangering poison, and temporarily the whole system participates in the influence of the stimulant. But as soon as the problem of expurgation has been solved, a debilitating reaction sets in; the organism sinks under the exhausting aftereffects of the unnatural irritant, the mind is clouded by lingering poison-fumes, the depression of vital energy avenges itself by protracted languor, and the misery of mental gloom.

   The benefits of the refrigeration tonic, on the other hand, are not modified by the risk of such penalties. The stimulating effect abides. And the first flush of that effect more than equals the bracing influence of the best drug-tonic. A cold bath renews the tension of nerve-vigor almost like refreshing sleep; its mental effect induces all the pleasant and none of the objectionable symptoms of intoxication.

   Like fasting and exercise, hydrotherapy is a true remedy, relieving the ailments of the human organism without exacting a price that makes the cure a greater curse than the evil.

   Hydrotherapy is one of the eldest offspring—perhaps the first-born—of natural hygiene. The desire to relieve the debilitating effects of summer heat by immersion and draughts of cold water is almost as instinctive as the craving for food. And it cannot have been long before the settlers of the higher latitudes noticed the fact that the health-impairing effects of indoor life could be counteracted by the same specific.

   A cold bath restored the vigor of the Celtic hunter, emerging dazed from the turf-fumes of his cave-dwelling, and an old Austrian army-officer of my acquaintance was probably not the first toper who contrived to "sober up" at short notice by putting his head under the spout of a horse-pump. In midsummer repeated plunge-baths helped to obviate the risk of dietetic disorders, and as early as A.D. 550 free bathing facilities had come to be included among the principal desiderata of a civilized city. Athens, Corinth, Memphis, Agrigentum, and the great seaport towns of Western Asia had them; in Carthage they were maintained by a public tax and the voluntary contributions of numerous merchant-princes.

   Imperial Rome became a Mecca of water-worshipers. Not less than six different aqueducts connected the city with the springs of wooded mountain-ranges—some of them twelve English miles from the corporation limits, and the Grand Thermæ of Caracalla atoned for all the demerits of the eccentric ruler; they formed a series of wall-enclosed artificial lakes, free to all, yet equipped with the conveniences of the most luxurious modern watering-place. The cold-water hall was large enough to accommodate the lovers of aquatic sports, and with its branch-tanks, in fact served the purpose of a swimming school.

   Frequent baths were recognized as a main condition of physical welfare, and perhaps for that very reason were neglected by the bigots of an antinatural creed. The self-torturing monks gloried in filth, and Llorente, in his "History of the Inquisition," mentions numerous instances of converts from Mohammedanism incurring suspicion by continuing to practise the daily ablutions of their former faith. One ex-Morisco, a citizen of Cadiz, had a quarrel with a servant-girl, and soon after was arrested and jailed on a charge of apostasy. After being four times arraigned and as often scourged within an inch of his life, he was at last confronted with his accuser. In her thirst for revenge, the slandermonging slut had denounced him as a backslider and supported her insinuations with the assertion that her former employer was in the habit of locking himself up and taking a bath thrice a week. By sacrificing half his fortune and summoning a dozen medical witnesses, the defendant escaped the stake on a plea of physical necessity; his duties as manager of a woolen mill, he proved, obliged him to avoid cutaneous troubles by extra sanitary precautions, which he otherwise abhorred as practices of benighted misbelievers.

   All over the Mediterranean coastlands free public baths were in ruins; but the belief in the concomitance of godliness and dirt does not seem to have been limited to Southern Europe. "Bathing, being pleasant as well as wholesome," says Henry Buckle, in his description of Scotch kirk-despotism," was considered a particularly grievous offense; and no man could be allowed to swim on Sunday. It was, in fact, doubtful whether swimming was lawful for a Christian at any time, even on week days, and it was certain that God had on one occasion shown his disapproval by taking away the life of a boy while he was indulging in that carnal practice." ("History of Civilization," Vol. II., p. 312.)

   '' As bathing was a heathenish custom, all public baths were to be destroyed" (by order of the Inquisition) "and even all larger baths in private houses." (Ibid., Vol. II., p. 44.)

   That millennium of insanity left its traces in the still far-spread mistrust of out natural instincts, and not before the middle of the eighteenth century a revival of common sense led to the re-establishment of free public baths in several cities of Holland and Southern Europe. Watering-places became fashionable, but the choice of the public favored warm springs, till Squire Priessnitz, a self-educated farmer of Graefenberg, Silesia, called attention to the remedial efficacy of cold-water prescriptions. In his private sanitarium—a mere annex, at first, of a homely farmhouse—he used shower-baths, sponge-baths, sitz-baths, and internal doses of pure water from a cold mountain spring, and proved that for the treatment of debilitating disorders his prescriptions made drugs superfluous.

   The theories of the water doctor, as his neighbors called him, were founded on personal experience. Soon after taking charge of a small farm he had been all but killed in a runaway accident. His survival seemed doubtful, and when he left the hospital of a neighboring city he "was a mere bundle of disabilities," stiff-jointed, half lame, and troubled with all sorts of pains and disorders. A swollen foot having been greatly benefited by immersion in cold water, the convalescent tried the effect of an occasional sitz-bath, then of daily all-over sponge-baths, and before the end of the second year had got rid of all his ailments. As far as he could remember, he had, indeed, never felt better in his life, except in early boyhood when a relative now and then took him out to a berry-picking camp in the highlands, and the little lad "wondered if the dwellers in paradise could have been much happier."

   In his subsequent school-years he used to take long rambles all by himself, feeling more at home in the mountain cliffs than in the tobacco-clouded village tavern—evidently a child of Nature, with the very instincts that would lead him to abandon drug-traditions for a new gospel of hygiene.

   He was no learned man, in the college sense of the word, but had read a good deal and thought more, and his arguments had the force born of intense conviction. Besides, his own experience was an argumentum ad hominem, and one by one his afflicted neighbors tried the inexpensive prescriptions of the water-doctor. Reformed topers felt their shattered nerves braced as no drugs, no ointments and strengthening diet had braced them before. Rickety youngsters improved till they could join in the sports of their contemporaries and often beat them at their own game. Invalids with one foot in the grave regained their vantage ground on the upper tablelands of health, and one old soldier became so enthusiastic a champion of the new sanitary creed that his savage denunciations of drug-mongers more than once got him into serious trouble.

   Squire Priessnitz himself never indulged in invectives, and kept his temper even when the neighboring physicians got him indicted for kur pfuscherie—the unauthorized practise of medicine; "mal-practice" being a term they could not apply to his case, as there were no plaintiffs and it could not be proved that anybody had ever been the worse for a cold-water cure. The sympathy of the public was emphatically on the side of the defendant, who relied on his native eloquence and asked the court if it was fair to force an indictment for the practise of medicine against a man who had never encouraged the belief in the efficacy of medicinal prescriptions or dispensed a grain of drugs in his life. "Bathing," he argued, "is a mere sanitary habit, and you might as well arrest me for advising my neighbors to take more outdoor exercise or try a change of diet."

   Those neighbors became a trifle too demonstrative in their applause, and the court warned all concerned to "be more careful hereafter," but, on the whole, thought it best to discharge the prisoner.

   The kreis physicus (chief health officer of the district) threatened to appeal the case, but at the urgent advice of a legal friend, concluded to desist.

   As a net result of the prosecution, Squire Priessnitz gained so many new patrons that he had to enlarge his sanitarium, and the next year could add a new branch for female patients. As usual in such cases, the charm of novelty attracted additional customers from ever-increasing distances, and two years before his death the now old "water doctor" could boast of having eight patients from France and two from the Netherlands. Women, strange to say, came to outnumber the male visitors, though probably only after Priessnitz had modified his rather heroic routine of prescriptions in favor of hysterical patients.

   We should add a few words about the fierce controversy which a few years after Priessnitz's death was excited by the attempt to suppress the "water-cures" which in the meantime had sprung up all over Western Europe. The indignation of the hydropaths now and then rose to a pitch of fury, but their grievance was really worse than the proverbial provocation of saints. In Las Casas' "History of the West Indian Colonies" an eyewitness describes the numerous victims of Spanish despotism, as worn-out fugitives who could be seen perishing in way-side ditches, and faintly crying "Hunger, hunger!"

   Even thus the lovers of truth had been persecuted and starved for a long series of centuries. Opponents of the autocrat swindle were slain as rebels. Dissenters from the insanities of the ghost-swindle were burned as heretics. Protests against the delusions of the drug-swindle were silenced by the bullies of the government quack-ring. For the coalition of shams had developed a union of state and drug-stores as oppressive and jealous as the union of State and Church, though the practise of medicine at last almost deserved the stigma of licensed murder.

"Die oft mit ihren hoellischen Latwergen
In diesen Thaelern, diesen Bergen,
Weit schlimmer als die Pest gehaust,"

says Goethe in the Prologue of "Faust"—"with their hellish nostrums they raged worse than the very pestilence."

   After a thousand years' reign of Bruno's "Bestia trionfante," the blatant beast of Imposture—truth, for the first time, had got in a word edgeways; one small standard of fact and naturalism had been raised and successfully defended against the swashbucklers of shams. Can we wonder that all friends of reform rushed to its support and repelled aggression as the refugees of an island, rising above the waves of a universal deluge, would repulse an attack of sea-monsters?

   Truth, for once, prevailed. Hydrotherapy contrived to hold its own against all comers, and health-seekers could rejoice in the certainty of having found a true remedy for a number of disorders which thus far had been only complicated and aggravated by conventional prescriptions.

   No observer, unbiased by hearsay prejudices, could doubt that Priessnitz had discovered a reliable specific for the cure of dyspepsia and nervous debility, for sick headaches, insomnia, and the disorders resulting from over-heating and protracted indoor life.

   It is true of the hydrotherapists of the nineteenth century have in several respects modified the methods of the Silesian doctor; but it is also certain that the objections against the main principles of the system have been successfully refuted. There is no danger in three-minute immersions, followed by an energetic use of the towel, and no harm can result from reducing the temperature of the bath to 50° Fahrenheit—least of all in midsummer. The supposed peril of plunge-baths or draughts of cold water "in the heat," is one of the silliest bugbears of sanitary superstition. Shall we be asked to believe that the most natural of all beverages could become health-endangering when the voice of instinct clamors most urgently for refrigeration? The preposterous absurdity of the idea is rebuked by the example of our instinct-guided fellow-creatures who in warm weather, and after hours of strenuous exercise, drink their fill of cold spring-water, without the slightest hesitation and without any appreciable injurious consequences. Children, admonished not to touch cold water till they are cooled off, might as well be warned against falling asleep when they are tired.

   And it is the same with cold baths. Professor Tyndale, in his "Hours of Recreation in the Alps," notices the astonishment of his Swiss guides who saw him plunge into the deep pool of a mountain torrent, after climbing uphill all afternoon in the glare of an August sun. "Their objections," he observes, "seemed to be founded on the difference in the temperature of the sun-heated atmosphere and that of the shaded brook, but that very contrast guaranteed the safety of the venture. In cold weather, when the organism is already suffering from the difficulty of maintaining its inner warmth at the proper medium, a cold bath might have overtaxed the vital staying powers; in midsummer there is no such risk." And training will even reduce the peril of winter baths to a safe minimum. Nay, the stimulating effect of the reflux of animal warmth (assisted by friction and brisk exercise) is perhaps most noticeable in moderately cold weather; and there are scores of habitues who take plunge-baths in ice-covered rivers to enjoy the subsequent glow of health, and maintain that the practise is the most reliable of all safeguards against the risk of "taking cold." Cold baths incidentally also serve the purpose of a cosmetic. "I would undertake to identify hydropathists of the heroic school by their complexions," says Professor Carl Vogt; "and I have known octogenarians who had preserved the bloom of youth by the persistent use of ice-water."

   Bathing, followed by the use of a coarse towel, stimulates the action of the skin to a degree that enables it to facilitate the work of the respiratory organs. Our pores have aptly been called supplementary lungs, and all sorts of impurities are secreted by cutaneous exhalations, as well as by the breathing process.

   Water of almost any temperature compatible with comfort would subserve that special end, but only cold water tends to expurgate microbes. Cold sponge-baths have often sufficed to nip an attack of climatic fevers in the bud; and Dr. Sydenham mentions the case of three smallpox patients who were capsized on the way to an island pesthouse, and in spite of (almost certainly because of) their involuntary ice-water bath, recovered with a facility unprecedented in the records of the lazaretto.

   Two baths a day, one early in the morning, the other just before supper, is the usual routine of our hydropathic health-resorts, which, besides, prescribe liberal internal doses of cold spring-water. Common sense is bidding fair to prevail against prejudice in regard to the use of cooling beverages in febrile diseases, the world over, and one of our largest American sanitariums (managed mainly on an eclectic plan of reform) now offers its nurses premiums for persuading sufferers from various disorders to drink a maximum quantity of pure cold water.

   The stronghold of the drug-delusion, indeed, is getting breached from all sides, but the leaders of the most numerous storming party must plead guilty to the charge of having recruited their ranks by manifold concessions to popular errors. Hydrotherapy has thus far not attained the front rank of progress by a numerical test of success, but its victories can certainly claim prestige as triumphs of uncompromising truth.

   In the cure of diseases by refrigeration, cold air is the readiest substitute for cold water. In the higher latitudes Nature supplies the remedy free of cost for six months of each year, and intermittently hundreds of times even in midsummer and at the threshold of the tropics, for the reduction of temperature in the early morning hours generally suffices to restore the functional vigor of the jaded organism.

   The remedial effect of cold air equals that of cold water; air-cures, indeed, offer the advantage of superior facility of application for the cure of respiratory disorders. Expurgative currents of cold air can be made to reach the tissue of the lungs, and the significance of that circumstance is commensurate with the prevalence of a delusion more mischievous than the drug-superstition, vis.: the current theories concerning the cause of catarrh and consumption.

   "Consumption," says an advocate of medical reform, "is a house-disease, and the plan of confining its victim in overheated, ill-ventilated sickrooms favors the development of its germs to a degree which the remedial powers of Nature strive in vain to counteract. . . . Not drugs or warmth, but cold, pure air is Nature's specific for the cure of consumption and ' colds.'"

   That "colds," or catarrhal affections, are so very common—so much, indeed, as to be considerably more frequent than all other diseases taken together—is mainly due to the fact that the cause of no other disorder of the human organism is so generally misunderstood. Few persons have recognized the origin of yellow fever; about the primary cause of asthma we are yet all in the dark; but in regard to "colds" alone the prevailing misconception of the truth has reached the degree of mistaking the cause for a cure, and the most effective cure for the cause of the disease. If we inquire after that cause, ninety-nine patients out of a hundred, and at least nine out of ten physicians, would answer: "Cold weather," "raw March winds," or "cold draughts"—in other words, outdoor air of a low temperature. If we inquire after the best cure, the answer would be, "Warmth and protection against cold draughts"—i. e., warm, stagnant, indoor air.

   And yet it can be proved with as absolute certainly as any physiological fact admits of being proved, that warm, vitiated indoor air is the cause, and cold outdoor air the best cure of lung-disorders. Many people "catch cold" every month in the year, and often two or three times a month. Very few get off with less than three colds a year; so that an annual average of five catarrhs would probably be an under-estimate. For the United States alone that would give us a yearly aggregate of three hundred and fifty-five million "colds."

   That such facilities for investigation have failed to correct the errors of our exegetical theory is surely a striking proof how exclusively our dealings with disease have been limited to the endeavor of suppressing the symptoms, instead of ascertaining and removing the cause. For, as a test of our unbiased faculty of observation, the degree of that failure would lead to rather unpronounceable conclusions. What should we think of the scientific acumen of a traveler who, after a careful examination of the available evidence, should persist in maintaining that mosquitoes are engendered by frost and exterminated by sunshine?

   Yet, if his attention had been chiefly devoted to the comparative study of mosquito ointments and mosquito bars, he might, for the rest, have been misled by such circumstances as the fact that gnats abound near the icy shores of Hudson Bay and are rarely seen on the sunny prairies of Southern Texas.

   In all the civilized countries of the colder latitudes, catarrhs are frequent in winter and early spring, and less frequent in midsummer: hence, the inference that catarrhs are caused by cold weather and can be cured by warm air.

   Yet of the two fallacies, the mosquito theory would, on the whole, be the less preposterous mis' take, for it is true that long droughts, by parching out the swamps, may sometimes reduce the mosquito plague; but no kind of warm weather will mitigate a catarrh, while the patient persists in doing what thousands never cease to do the year round, namely, to expose their lungs, night after night, to the vitiated, sickening atmosphere of an unventilated bedroom. "Colds" are, indeed, less frequent in midwinter than at the beginning of spring. Frost is such a powerful disinfectant that in very cold nights the lung-poisoning atmosphere of few houses can resist its purifying influence; in spite of padded doors, in spite of "weather-strips" and double windows, it reduces the indoor temperature enough to paralyze the floating disease-germs.

   The penetrative force of a polar night-frost exercises that function with such resistless vigor that it defies the preventive measures of human skill; and all Arctic travelers agree that among the natives of Iceland, Greenland, and Labrador pulmonary diseases are actually unknown.

   Protracted cold weather thus prevents epidemic catarrh; but during the first thaw Nature succumbs to art; smouldering stove fires add their fumes to the effluvia of the dormitory; tight-fitting doors and windows exclude the means of salvation; superstition triumphs, the lung-poison operates, and the next morning a suffering, coughing, and red-nosed family discuss the cause of their affliction. "Taken cold"—that much they premise, without a debate. But where and when? Last evening, probably, when the warm south wind tempted them to open the window for a moment. Or, "when those visitors kept chatting on the porch and a drop of water from the thawing roof fell on my neck." Or else, the boys caught it by playing in the garden and not changing their stockings when they came home. Resolved, that a person cannot be too careful as long as there is any snow on the ground. But even that explanation fails in spring, and when the incubatory influence of the first moist heat is brought to bear on the catarrh-germs of a large city, a whole district-school is often turned into a snuffling congress. The latter part of March is the season of epidemic catarrhs, and the evil is ascribed to "dampness," when the cold-theory becomes at last too evidently preposterous.

   To an unprejudiced observer that theory, though, is equally untenable in the coldest months of the year. No man can freeze himself into a catarrh. Out-of-doors we cannot "catch cold."

   "I have, upon the approach of cold weather, removed my undergarments," says Dr. Charles Page, "and have then attended to my outdoor affairs, minus the overcoat habitually worn; I have slept in winter in a current blowing directly about my head and shoulders; upon going to bed, I have sat in a strong current, entirely nude, for a quarter of an hour, on a very damp, cold night, in the fall of the year. These and similar experiments I have made repeatedly, and have never been able to catch cold. I became cold, sometimes quite cold, and became warm again, that is all. ("Natural Cure," p. 40.)

   There are many ways, less often sought than found, for "becoming quite cold and warm again," but an experimenter, trying to contract a catarrh in that manner, would soon give it up as a futile enterprise; after two or three attempts he would find the attainment of his purpose more hopeless than before; he would find that instead of impairing, he had improved the functional vigor of his breathing-apparatus. Cold is a tonic that invigorates the respiratory organs when all other stimulants fail.

   As soon as oppression of the chest, obstruction of the nasal ducts, and unusual lassitude indicate that a "cold has been taken"—in other words, that an air-poison has fastened upon the bronchi—its influence should at once be counteracted by the purest and coldest air available, and the patient should not stop to weigh the costs of a day's furlough against the danger of a chronic catarrh. In case imperative duties should interfere, the enemy must be met after dark, by devoting the first half of the night to an outdoor campaign and the second half to an encampment before a wide-open window.

   There is no doubt that the proximate cause of a catarrh consists in the action of some microscopic parasite that develops its germs while the resistive power of the respiratory organs is diminished by the influence of impure air. Cold air arrests that development by direct paralysis; i.e., by lethargizing and eventually destroying the vitality of the disease-germs. Towards the end of the year a damp, sultry day—the catarrh-weather par excellence—is sometimes followed by a sudden frost, and at such times I have often found that a six-hours' inhalation of pure, cold night-air will free the obstructed air-passages so effectually that on the following morning hardly a slight huskiness of the voice remains to suggest the narrowness of the escape from a two-weeks' respiratory misery.

   It would be a mistake to suppose that "colds" can be propagated only by direct transmission, or the breathing of recently vitiated air. Catarrh germs, floating in the atmosphere of an ill-ventilated bedroom, may preserve their vitality for weeks after the house has been abandoned, and the next renter should not move in till the whole building has been subjected to an air-bath, and till wide-open windows and a through-draught of several days has removed every trace of a "musty" smell.

   About the comparative advantages of dry and moist ("marine") climates opinions are divided, with a preponderance of argument in favor of the former, but so much is certain that for the cure of lung-complaints a low temperature, with or without an excess of atmospheric moisture, is preferable to the perennial heat of the tropics. "I shall not attempt to explain," says Benjamin Franklin, "why damp clothes occasion colds, rather than wet ones, because I doubt the fact; I believe that neither the one nor the other contributes to this effect, and that the causes of catarrhs are totally independent of wet, and even of cold." ("Miscellaneous Works," p. 216.)

   Nor can drugs compensate the lack of Nature's specific. In the language of our instincts every feeling of discomfort suggests its own remedy. If the proximity of a glowing stove begins to roast your shins, the alarmed nerves cry out—not for patent ointments, not for anti-caustic liniments and "pain-killers," but for a lower temperature Nothing else will permanently appease them. Millions of prisoners, school-children and factory-slaves, pine for lung-food as a starving man yearns for bread, and that hunger cannot be stilled with cough-pills, but only with fresh air.

   Pure cold air is also a sovereign remedy for digestive disorders. The assimilative capacity of the human organism increases with the distance from the equator. An Esquimaux can digest a quantum of food that would crapulate three Hottentots and six Hindus. Camping in the open air whets the appetite even without the aid of active exercise. A bracing temperature exacts a sort of automatic exercise: It accelerates the circulation, it promotes the oxidation of the blood, and stimulates the whole respiratory process. The generation of animal caloric has to be increased to balance the depression of the external temperature. Hence the invigorating effect of mountain air and of sea-voyages. The first dose of the tonic can be applied in-doors by gymnastics in the ancient sense of the word that implies exercise in a state of nudity ("gymnos," in Greek, meaning simply "naked")—a few minutes' pause between undress and bedtime.

   People who have got rid of the night-air superstition can almost defy dyspepsia by sleeping in a cross-draught, or in cold weather at least near a half-open window. Cold, fresh air is an invaluable aid to the assimilation of non-nitrogenous articles of food (fat meat, butter, etc.). Stifling bedrooms neutralize the effects of outdoor exercise. Winter is, therefore, on the whole the most propitious time for beginning a dyspepsia cure. In summer a highland sanitarium is the best place to start with; or, for coast-dwellers, a breezy sea-shore.

   The efficacy of an air-bath as a cure of insomnia is suggested by the hypnotic influence of refrigeration. At least a dozen different species of our North American mammals get drowsy enough in cold weather to go to sleep about the end of November and postpone their awakening till spring. We sleep sounder in winter than at any other time of the year, and Dr. Franklin, who, like Bacon and Goethe, had the gift of anticipative intuitions, recommends air sitz-baths as an excellent substitutes for opiates. "In summer-nights, when I court sleep in vain," he says, "I often get up and sit at the open window or at the foot of my bed, stark-naked for a quarter of an hour. That simple expedient removes the difficulty (whatever its cause), and upon returning to bed I can generally rely upon getting two or three hours of most refreshing sleep."

   It can, however, do no harm to combine an air-bath with a few minutes of indoor exercise. Perfect freedom of motion is, indeed, incompatible with the restraint of artificial teguments, and the effect of Dr. Franklin's prescription could generally be improved by gymnastics tending to stimulate the action of the respiratory organs. During sleep the blood is only imperfectly oxidized, and an accumulated deficiency of that sort (indicated by choking fits) is one of the most common causes of interrupted slumber.

   The solaria, or sunbath-rooms of the ancients, probably served a similar purpose. Stoves and chimney fires—though not unknown—were rare in Athens, and in Rome were considered a prerogative of wealth; the great plurality, even of well-to-do citizens, survived the winter under a load of cumbersome garments, and now and then retired to a solarium to give their skins a chance for direct contact with the circulation-stimulating atmosphere.

   Wet feet, especially feet wetted by a walk in the chill dew of a meadow, ranked with the chief sanitary bugbears of our forefathers, and that a bugbear of that sort should now be ridden as a fashionable hobby is certainly an encouraging sign of the times. It proves at all events that hygienic prejudices are not unconquerable, but the mass-pilgrimages to the meadows of Woerishofen in Southern Germany make it evident that—well, that not all of our fellow-Caucasians have a right to poke fun at Charley Lambs' house-burning Chinamen. A citizen of Qwang-Soo, according to the most immortal essay of the gentle "Eliah," once found the remains of a cremated pig in the ruins of a burnt dwelling, and, ecstasized by a taste of the crust, hastened to spread the tidings of great joy. Pork, thus far, had always been eaten raw, and opinions differed as to the propriety of improving its flavor by a deviation from a time-honored custom. The cremation party at last prevailed, and even secured the sanction of legislators, but every time they felt a hankering after roast spare-ribs they thought it necessary to set a house afire.

   Yet the price of an old Chinese farmstead cabin can hardly have exceeded that of an American ticket to Woerishofen, where the presiding priest of the new temple of health compels his converts to perform barefoot gallopades in a wet clover-field. No doubt a good many of them do get their money's worth in improved health, but the physiological value of Father Kneipp's prescription is simply that of a refrigeration cure, and every one of his forty-odd thousands of yearly visitors—some of them from distant Canada—would have derived exactly the same amount of benefit from a sponge-bath in the woodshed of his native ranch. The hindfoot plan of the Woerishofen prophet is, in fact, nothing but localized hydrotherapy, out and out less efficacious that the system of Squire Priessnitz, and efficacious at all only by virtue of long-continued repetitions. Special virtues of dew-moisture? Of South-German varieties of clover? Believe it, if you can, but stop smiling at Qwang-Soo pork procedures.

   All there is of sense in the semi-mystic circulars of the clover-patch Æsculapius is founded on the fact that the early morning may be a specially propitious time for hydropathic transactions; the patients' lungs get the benefit of the cool morning air while his body is revelling in the pond of Siloam, or his feet in the parsonage pasture.

   And since cool mornings are rare in the summer season of our lowlands, the "mountain cure" has a legitimate claim to the attention of health-seekers, especially where highlands have preserved their wealth of air-filtering forests. Carbonic acid, the lung-poisoning residium of respiration and combustion, is heavier than the atmospheric air, and accumulates in low places—in wells, in cellars, in deep, narrow valleys, etc.—and often mingles with the malarious exhalations of low, swampy plains. On very high mountains, on the other hand, the air becomes too rarefied to be breathed with impunity. It causes a spasmodic acceleration of the respiratory process, and is, therefore, especially distressing to diseased (wasted) lungs, whose functions are already abnormally quickened, and cannot be further stimulated without overstraining their mechanism.

   In the temperate zone the purest and at the same time most respirable air is found at an elevation of about four thousand feet above the level of the sea—an altitude corresponding to the midway terraces of the European Alps, and the average summit-regions of our Southern Alleghanies. The broad tablelands of the Cumberland Range are several hundred feet above the dust and mosquito level.

   Between the thirty-fourth and thirty-sixth degrees of north latitude the elevated plateaux have the further advantage of a climate that equalizes the contrasts of the seasons: it mitigates the summer more than it aggravates the winter.

   Southerly winds predominate, and melt the snow with the same breezes that cool the midsummer weeks, for in the dog-days the Mexican tablelands are considerably cooler than our Northern prairie States.

   Night frosts, it is true, occur a month earlier in the lowlands, but mark the beginning of the season when a sojourn in a mountain camp attains its maximum of sanitary benefit. How absurdly the risk of a bivouac in the snow has been overrated, may be inferred from the fact that the rumor of several miraculous cures a few years ago attracted hundreds of consumptives to winter-camps in the upper Adirondacks, in a climate quite as rigorous as that of Western Canada. They lived in tents, most of them, and passed the days hunting and snow-shoveling, and the nights comfortably enough under twenty woolen blankets, if a dozen were not sufficient, and all faithfully following Dr. Dio Lewis' plan of giving the ice-cold and ice-pure highland air a chance to expurgate their microbe-ridden lungs. Invalids who would have coughed away their lives in a tropical swamp-resort recovered in these cloud-land camps—not men only but women and feeble children. It has, indeed, often been observed that the moral effect of protracted confinement in a hospital is not favorable to the chances of recovery, and, moreover, a private establishment lessens the danger of contagion. And in the highlands of North Carolina, Tennessee, and Northern Georgia land and labor are so cheap that even people of moderate means can build a sanitarium of their own.

   A log house can be made as airy as any tent, and is out and out more comfortable. A rough-hewed porch-roof, projecting like the veranda of a Swiss chalet, will keep the cabin both dry and airy, square holes in the center of each wall can serve as windows in fine weather, and during a storm can be kept shut with a sliding board. Between May and November the winds of the Southern Alleghanies come from the south or southwest, and in order to get the full benefit of the pure air, the house should face the plain from one of the thousand promontories that rise above the terrace-land of the "Piedmont country." Have the door on the south side and keep it wide open all night, as well as the windows or louvres in the opposite wall. If the windows do not reach to the ground, spread your bedclothes upon a hurdle bedstead, rather than on the floor, in order to enjoy the full current of the night-breeze.

   Night and day one can thus breathe mountain airs that have not been tainted by the touch of earthly things since they left the pine forests of the Mexican Sierras. Every inspiration is a draught from the fountain-head of the atmospheric stream.

   There is no need of living on oiled sardines where the brooks are full of speckled trout. Those who must break the commandment of Brahma (and the highland air confers certain immunities) may devour their humble relatives in the form of wild turkeys, quails, and 'possums, but the products of the vegetable kingdom are cheap and diversified enough to make up a tolerable menu. Sweet potatoes at 12 cents a peck, string beans 15, green peas 25, strawberries 10 cents a quart.

   Whortleberries "huckleberries") are sold at 10 cents a gallon, but the pleasure of picking them is worth a great deal more. The lamest and weakest can join in that sport, for the shrub attains a height of three feet, and thus saves one the trouble of stooping, to conquer health by that utilitarian method.

   Whenever the weather becomes too warm to guarantee the benefit of the enterprise on the main point, air baths should be supplemented by plunge baths in one of the pools of the never-failing mountain brooks. In the great forest-preserves of our East American highlands every glen has a rivulet of its own, born in the Land of the Sky, and preserving the temperature of its headwaters in the shade of spruce-pines, laurel-thickets, and overhanging rocks. Tellico River, with its fountain in the summit regions of the Unakas, at the border of Tennessee and North Carolina, is still as cold as spring-water where it issues from the foothills, fifteen miles further west, and there are fine bathing pools on the very plateaux, especially those of the Cumberland Range, which at several points north of Chattanooga attains a width of ten miles, with midway dells and hillocks.

   Nor is there any lack of opportunities for trying Professor Tyndall's combination of cooling baths with blood-warming exercise. The choice between the various chances for entertaining work is the only difficulty, for Nature has provided them in embarrassing profusion. Expert bee-hunters can find three or four hive trees in a single clay. The chestnut forests of the upper ridges are full of squirrels, and with a dog, a sack, and a good axe it is not difficult to catch one alive and turn it over to the quartermaster of the pet department. Climbing trees is an exercise that brings in action nearly every muscle of the human body, and, like the mal de monte, the shudder that seizes the traveler at the brink of Alpine precipices, the dizziness that takes away the breath returns it with interest and is a mechanical asthma-cure.

   Entomologists may combine the gratification of their mania with useful exercise by rolling logs in quest of staghorn beetles. Log-rolling and tumbling rocks from the tops of projecting cliffs is the spice of life in the engineering enterprises which a camp full of male North Americans are sure to set afoot—such as enlarging the entrance of a cave, constructing a graded trail to the next spring, to the next wagon-road, or to a favorite lookout point.

   Enterprises of that sort involve a good deal of grubbing and chopping, but a suit of Turner Khaki makes work pleasant. The despotism of fashion is not recognized in mountain camps. A pair of linen trousers, a hunting shirt, and loose necktie suffice for a hygienic summer-dress. In the afternoon remove the necktie and roll up the sleeves. It can do no harm to imbibe fresh air by all available means and let the cutaneous lungs share in the luxury. Nor is there any excuse for the widespread fallacy that it is dangerous, even in the most sultry nights, to remove the bed-blankets. Kick them into the farthest corner if they become too warm, and sleep in your shirt and drawers, or under a linen bed-sheet. Half-naked lazzaroni sleep the year round on the stone terrace of the Museo Borbonico, and outlive the asthmatic burghers in their sweat-box dormitories.

   The body effects part of its breathing through the pores. Painting a man all over with yellow ochre and copal varnish would kill him as surely as hanging him by the neck. The confined air between the sleeper's body and a stratum of heavy blankets gets gradually surcharged with carbonic acid—in warm weather even to the verge of the saturation-point. The perspiration is thus forced back upon the body; and the lungs—perhaps already weakened by disease—have to do double work.

   "Hier bin ich Mensch, hier darf ich's sein." says Goethe's "Faust," in his mountain retreat, and a prejudice-defying friend of mine makes no scruple of arising from the pallet of his summer-camps and roaming the moonlit woods in the costume of Adam, drinking in oxygen through every pore, and wondering if the longevity of the ancients had not something to do with the fact that they could enjoy air-baths of that sort all summer, and not in moonlight only.

   A traveling revivalist displays charts of the Eastern continents to illustrate the vast area of territories still in need of missionary labors. The extent of the field for sanitary reform might be realized by any observer strolling the streets of a large city in the twilight of a summer morning. In the tropics—even on the cool tablelands of Northern Mexico, he would see thousands of sleepers encamped upon the texadas, or flat roofs of their dwelling-houses; but in the United States, in Great Britain, France, Germany and Austria he would see 999 of a 1000 windows tightly closed, even in a temperature making indoor confinement positive torture.

   "Night air? What are you afraid of?" asked Miss Florence Nightingale in her reports from the Crimean hospitals; "do you suppose God's free air is made deadly by the temporary absence of light? You surely cannot expect to breathe day-air after sunset; your only choice is between the life-giving, health-restoring night-air of the outdoor world and the vitiated, sickening night-air of your sweltering dormitories."

   But what the self-torturers are really afraid of is a "draught;" in other words, air in motion. Perceptible currents of air, no matter how pure, no matter how passionately welcomed by the miasma-clogged lungs, they dread as messengers of death. Their fear of night-air is founded chiefly on the circumstance that the cooling of the atmosphere generates air-currents within a few hours after the sunset even of the sultriest day. So they close their bedroom windows or nail them down; they invent double window-sashes and "weather-strips," to exclude the slightest breath of life-air.

   And yet the sanitary value of fresh air is generally proportioned to the persistency of its currents. Air in motion removes the impurities of the atmosphere. It renews the supply of oxygen. Its ministrations attend both to the disinfection and the nourishment of the respiratory organs. The sanitary difference between fresh air in motion and stagnant indoor air is that between the pure water of a running fountain and the festering slime of a cesspool.

   The comparatively low temperature of night-air only increases its value for expurgative purposes. The appalling, drug-defying mortality of a large city sweltering under the glare of the dog-day sun, is abated by the first spell of cooler weather. The veering of a midsummer breeze from south to northwest reduces the death-rate of infants two-thirds. Canadian trappers who leave their supply-camp with a bad cough, get rid of it on the fifth or sixth day "out." They may get footsore, and if game is scarce, hipped and homesick, but the feeling of haleness about the chest continues. Night-frosts do not affect it. Fatigues rather improve it. They may wake up with a feeling of frost-cramp from their chillblained toes to their shivering knees, but the lungs are at ease; no cough, no asthmatic distress, no stitch-like pains, no night-fever.

   An old campaigner would laugh at the idea of "colds" being taken in the open air. He knows that they germinate in close bedrooms and flourish in musty beer-shops, but vanish in the prairie-wind.

   Houses cannot be kept too airy, no room or chamber should ever be kept permanently closed for days together. Never mind about the improvement of ventilatory contrivances: patent

   "ventilators" are mostly calculated to humor the prejudice against perceptible air-currents. They are intended to smuggle in a modicum of fresh air unnoticed, near the edge of the ceiling, in a roundabout way through halls and antechambers. One open window is worth a dozen of such compromise tricks.

   Open the dining-room windows in the forenoon; and the kitchen windows in the afternoon; no revolving-fan can compete with the effect of a direct influx of atmospheric air. If you teach a class or work in a warehouse or counting-house, prevail upon the managers to ventilate the place during the dinner-recess; or else try to do your work in the airiest corner, near a window or near the door of an airy hall. In ill-ventilated rooms the azote miasma has its centers of destiny that can be avoided with a little management.

   But at all events get rid of the night-air superstition, and enjoy the blessings of an airy bedroom—the luxury, I may add. A natural instinct may be suppressed, but needs but little encouragement to resume its normal functions, like a river returning to its ancient channel. Thus, the fresh-air instinct. In families cursed with the night-air delusion children are often fuddled with miasma till they prefer it to fresh air and dislike to sleep near an open window. But in a single month that aversion can be changed into a decided predilection, till the cool breath of the night-wind becomes a chief condition of a good night's rest, and the closing of the bedroom windows creates a feeling of uneasiness, not unlike the discomfort induced by an attempt to sleep with your head under the blankets. In the sleeping dens of the French village taverns, where after September the window-sashes are actually nailed down, the children of a hygienic home would pine for a draught of oxygen as a sweltering traveler thirsts after fresh water.

   Besides open windows, Dio Lewis recommends an open fireplace and a good wood fire all night; but that is a matter of taste; an extra blanket will serve the same purpose, and the danger of damp bed-clothes in mid-winter has been as strangely overrated as the perils of cold drinking-water in midsummer.

   In stormy nights a half-closed "rain-shutter" (a window-blind with broad bars) will keep the room perfectly dry without excluding the air. If the mercury sinks below zero, close every window in the house. Intense cold is a disinfectant that purifies even the air of the hide-covered dungeons where the natives of the Polar regions pass the long winter nights.

   In the dog-days, on the other hand, do not be satisfied with anything less than a through-draft; open every window in and around the bedroom.

   It should also be remembered that the lung-poison of a stifling bed-chamber may undo the sanitary benefit of a long day passed in out-door exercise. European tourists can combine the useful with the agreeable by doing their sightseeing afoot, but should not forget that Alpine morning-breezes may fail to neutralize the bedroom air of a South-German tavern.

   Nor can the purest atmosphere of our planet—that of the breezy ocean—be relied upon to counteract the monstrous air-filth of an unventilated cock-pit. Sailors, in spite of an abundance of outdoor exercise, thus often contract lung-disorders, and Captain Cook relates that the natives of the South Sea Islands, after visiting the sailors' cabin of his ship, were seized with strange respiratory afflictions: sneezing-fits, coughs, and pains in the chest, together with a kind of pulmonary fever. Generations of outdoor life had failed to protect these children of Nature against the effects of a brief exposure to a concentrated lung-poison; nay, its effect upon their unprepared organism was more violent than that experienced by persons in whom habit had established a sort of "physiological tolerance"—akin to the strange adaption that enables habitues to swallow enormous doses of arsenic and opium.

   For Professor Bates, in his "Naturalist on the River Amazon," states that the natives of Western Brazil have learned by sad experience to avoid a visit to the interior of a white man's dwelling, as travelers in Java would shun the valley of the Upas Tree. Catarrh germs, in their organism, take the form of consumption-microbes, and there appears to be no cure for that disease in the sweltering river swamps of the tropics. The stricken native coughs night and day, and the disease in that virulent modification of its development, terminates life in less than two years. The Quahiba Indians, adds the same traveler, would sooner load the horse of a Caucasian visitor with presents than carry their hospitality to the fatal degree of allowing him to pass a night in their cabins. "Do you bring influenza, Señor?" they ask with a look of alarm, when a stranger approaches their wigwams.

   The German, Austrian, and Russian shepherds stay the whole summer with their flocks, but as a class, are nevertheless remarkably subject to pulmonary diseases, and for the following reason: They pass the night in a Schaefer-huette, a sort of ambulance-box, eight feet by four, and six feet high, without windows, but with a tight-fitting sliding door. This door the ill-advised proprietor shuts after dark, and breathes all night the azotized air of his Black Hole of Calcutta on wheels. In the morning he awakens with a hacking cough, superadded to profuse perspiration, and a feeling of nausea. The air of the mountains gradually relieves the other symptoms, but not the cough, which finally becomes chronic. And, with exquisite facilities for the attainment of a patriarchal longevity, the slave of the night-air superstition thus dies in the forenoon of his life.

   Cold baths—in air or water—and thorough ventilation become more necessary with every degree further south, and a Spanish army-surgeon of Santiago de Cuba a few years ago surprised the medical faculty with the success of his experiments in the artificial refrigeration of a military hospital. By means of ice-vaults and force-ventilators he cooled some of the wards to a temperature of fifty degrees Fahrenheit below that of the outdoor atmosphere, and cured not only sleeplessness and nervous prostration, but climatic fevers of all sorts, and even cholera. In the treatment of yellow fever his treatment reduced the usual death-rate four-fifths, and that in spite of the fact that his wards were overcrowded and handicapped by the lack of trained nurses.

   Practical arguments of that sort will ultimately prevail against prejudice, and it may be safely predicted that hydropathic prescriptions are destined to supersede drug-rnongery in the treatment of all germ-diseases, and that before the end of the present century our dwelling-houses will be artificially cooled in summer as successfully as we now warm them in winter.