Another, and a very important step in the progress of the bath was the contrivance of a mode of heating by means of which the temperature might be made uniform, and might be regulated in any manner that should be required. The hot stones of the North American medicine-man were clearly a very bungling and uncertain expedient; little better than the warm skin of a newly-killed animal; and the wood fire of the Irish sweating-houses was more objectionable still, not only on account of the impossibility of regulating the heat, but also from the resulting impurity of the atmosphere and the danger of leaving fragments of the heated ashes on the floor. The next contrivance, and that which has continued to be the practice up to the present day, was the construction of a furnace under the floor--in other words, a _hypocaust_. Mr. Urquhart, speaking of the existence of baths among the Mexicans and their probable introduction by the Phœnicians, remarks:--"However magnificent their public monuments," their baths were "such as are found in almost every house in Morocco,--a small apartment seven feet square, with a cupola roof five to six feet high, and a slightly convex floor, under one side of which there is a fire, and a small low door to creep in by." Reviewing the probable rise and progress of the bath, there seems little doubt that the bath took its origin in the East, the dwelling-place of our first parents, the birth-place of civilization and knowledge. It was known at a very early period in Phœnicia. Mr. Urquhart, in his recent work, "The Lebanon,"[4] relates his discovery of a Phœnician temple, or crypt, among the ruins of Baalbeck, or Baalbeth, _the House of Baal_--the Heliopolis, or _City of the Sun_, of the Greeks; in which were traces of the existence of the bath. "But the Phœnician crypt was not my only discovery. In a gap opening a few feet into the masonry, I found mortar hard as stone where exposed to the air, but soft within. Yet it was unlike other mortar; it was dark grey, with particles of charcoal; when I brought out some, it was recognised at once, and called _kissermil_, or ashes from the bath. Those ashes are still used in this country for mortar, which with this addition becomes as hard as stone. According to the old construction, the baths were heated as an oven is, brushwood and dung being used as well as wood. The combustion not being complete, there remain various chemical compounds, alkali, ammonia, sulphate and carbonate of lime, and carbon, which by entering into new combinations, bind the mortar into a distinct substance." [4] "The Lebanon (Mount Souria): a History and a Diary." By David Urquhart. 1860.