Nothing is more soothing to the irritable impulses of the passions, than the peculiar serenity which the bath imparts. The Romans in their days of sensuality, invariably had recourse to the bath to relieve the effects of their dissipation, and of great fatigue from travelling, &c. Who is there, we would ask, that has not experienced, after a night’s debauch in the indulgence of luxuries, when the head and heart have been oppressed, and the nervous energies prostrated, the restorative and invigorating effects of the bath,--for what allays feverish irritability and perturbation of the nervous system so admirably as the _cold_, _tepid_, or _hot bath_, according as the offender may have been accustomed to use. Everywhere on the Continent, baths are to be had in the greatest state of perfection. The French perform entire personal ablution daily. In Italy, Holland, and Germany they patronise the bath to a great extent, and amongst the Turks and Persians, and throughout Asia, bathing is imperative as a part of their religion. They consider it an absolute necessary of life, whilst we, the most refined people in the world, are satisfied with a change of linen, and that too, very often over a not very clean under-garment, or body flannel! The Hungarians and Russians bathe after the manner of the ancients; in Russia especially, where the bath makes so much a part of the system of living, it is used by persons of every age, and under all circumstances. A Russian considers that the bath is a remedy for all his ailments; he flies to it on all occasions; men, women at their lying-in, and children, in almost all sicknesses, and before and after a journey, &c., resort to the bath as their _solatium_--which, to use the words of the illustrious Cullen, “imparts a sense of youth, vigour, and self-complacency.” The Romans for five hundred years together were without physicians; it was by means of the bath they effected all their cures of disease, and to this day many nations cure their maladies by the use of baths,--in which there is nothing so very marvellous, as the simplicity of such means at first sight may lead persons to suppose, when we consider the importance of the skin in the animal economy, that it is not merely the organ of sensation, but that it is endowed with an extensive and complicated nervous apparatus, through which its sympathies with the entire organism are managed, and that it possesses extensive secretory, excretory, and absorbing powers, the _normal condition_ of these functions being essential not only to _health_, but _to life itself_.