As to the action of the bath upon the cutaneous texture, we know but little of it during life. They say in medicine that it softens, relaxes and unbends this texture; this is vague language to which no precise meaning is attached, and which is no doubt borrowed from the relaxation which the skin of dead bodies undergoes, or even tanned leather, when exposed to water. A bath acts upon the vital forces of the skin, raises or diminishes them, as I shall say; but it leaves its texture in the same state; it is only that of the epidermis which it alters, as we shall see. Macerated in water of a moderate degree of temperature, in that of cellars for example which does not vary, the human skin softens, swells but little, becomes evidently whiter, and remains for a long time without experiencing any other alteration than that of a putrefaction infinitely less than that of the muscular, glandular, mucous textures, &c. subjected to the same experiment. This putrefaction, which removes the epidermis, appears to be much greater on the side nearest to this membrane; at the end of two or three months the skin loses but little of its consistence. It does not become pulpy as the tendons and muscles in this length of time when macerated; it does not become a fetid pulp till the end of three or four months. I have preserved some of it for eight months, which has still its primitive form, but which feels liquid under the fingers when pressed a little. In the half putrid state, the skin still preserves the faculty of crisping from the action of caloric; it moves about when placed on burning coals, or when plunged into boiling water. When once reduced to a really putrid state it loses this property. Exposed to ebullition, the dermoid texture when well separated from the cellular, furnishes less scum than the muscular, the glandular and the mucous; it resembles in this respect the tendons, no doubt because being almost wholly gelatinous, it contains but little albumen. In the horny hardening that takes place a little before ebullition commences, it twists and then always becomes convex on the side of the epidermis, and concave on the opposite side; and for this reason; the fibres of the chorion in contracting by the horny hardening, are pressed against each other; all the spaces which exist between them are effaced; now, as these spaces are very large in the second direction, the dermoid texture necessarily becomes more contracted there, whilst in the first, the spaces hardly existing at all, every thing being almost solid, the fibres have less space to contract, they remain longer, and the surface continues larger. In the natural state the cavity of these spaces, being filled with cellular texture, increases the extent of the internal surface; this space then disappearing, this surface becomes contracted.