There are of course many things to be considered in making selection of a bath besides the height above sea-level. Attention must be paid to the local configuration of the district, and the sanitary condition of the town or village in which the healing spring is situated. It is manifestly unadvisable for an invalid who has been sent to the Alps for the benefit of a mountain climate to settle down in some narrow gorge, exposed perhaps, only to one wind, into which the sun only peeps at midday, where the climate knows no medium between the two extremes of heat and cold, where the river perhaps has been converted into an open sewer by the inhabitants, and where the population is a mixture of the Goitrous and the Cretinous. Such localities are to be found, and it may well happen that the invalid may go to the bath to be cured of his gout, and return with typhoid or ague. Some few years back the writer was travelling in the Vosges mountains, and stopped a night at a well-known watering-place, taking up his abode in the Bad-haus. The situation of the town was extremely picturesque; the valley in which it lay was verdant, the hills were well clothed with foliage, and the mineral springs of the district were such as might well be recommended to many patients. The inhabitants, however, had seen fit to turn the lovely stream which meandered through the valley into a sewer. Into it abominations of every kind were thrown, and its pebbly bottom had become obscured by broken crockery, old tin pots, old boots and shoes, and other refuse. The swine were driven into it every morning as if on purpose to defile it, and what should have been one of the chief attractions of the district had become a pestilential nuisance, exhaling filthy odours, and fit only to be bridged over and hidden absolutely from the light. It is not sufficient in making choice of a bathing place to consider only those dry facts which are capable of being stated in figures, but the intending bather should seek reliable information as to the sanitary condition of the town, as well as of the hotel or lodging-house which he proposes to inhabit. This information is only to be got from disinterested patients who have made a sojourn in the locality. Guide books are seldom to be trusted, and special treatises on the virtues of this or that bath are to be regarded as the works of a fervid imagination in the absence of confirmatory evidence. The most potent cause in establishing the popularity of this or that bathing place has been the heat of the water, and there is perhaps no hot spring in Europe which was not used for bathing by the Romans, or which has not been used from times of remote antiquity by the inhabitants of the district. It is so convenient and so cheap to have hot water ready to hand without the necessity of huge furnaces, enormous chimneys, expensive boilers, and endless pipes, that it is not surprising that such a valuable natural gift should be appreciated.