When adopted as a social custom, the Turkish model is clearly that which ought to be imitated, on account of the moderate temperature which belongs to it. The higher temperatures are upon their trial; they are not a necessity of the process, they may have their uses in disease; but it would be best to treat them with caution, or, as a medicine, leave them wholly in medical hands. The Bath for the public should be one that they may adopt with as much safety as the basin of water with which they wash their hands. The use of an elevated temperature is founded on the well-known power of heat of destroying organic impurity--such as odour, miasma, and animal poison. But, in this acceptation, when applied to the human body, it becomes a medicine of the most potent kind; and should, therefore, be left to medical management. _Henrietta Street, Cavendish Square, March, 1861._ CONTENTS. ILLUSTRATIONS. Ground-plan of the Palæstra or Gymnasium of the Greeks: after Vitruvius p. xix Plan of the Roman Thermæ, from a drawing taken from the walls of the Baths of Titus p. xxi The Hypocaustum of the Roman Bath at Chester p. xxiii The Calidarium of Mr. George Witt's Bath p. xxv Mr. Urquhart's Bath at Riverside p. xxvii Ground-plan of my own Bath at Richmond Hill p. xxix The Dureta; the Moorish, and probably Phœnician, Couch, adopted by the Emperor Augustus p. xxxi The person reclining on this couch is so completely supported that he feels as though he were suspended in air. CHAPTER I. THE BATH, an animal instinct; coeval with the earliest existence of man; common to every rank; a ceremony of his birth, and a funereal rite; discovery of thermal springs; the Scamander; commemoration of the hot-bath by Homer; the hot-baths of Hercules; estimation of hot-baths by the Phœdrians; frequency of thermal springs; Hamâms of the East, Hamâm Ali, near ancient Nineveh; Hamâm Meskhoutin in Algeria; Baths of Nero in Italy; German thermal springs, Carlsbad, Wiesbaden, Ems, Aix-la-Chapelle; the Geysers of Iceland; thermal springs of Amsterdam Island; of America; of England, Bath, Bristol, Buxton, Matlock pp. 1-5 Primitive idea of the artificial hot-vapour bath; Bath of the American Indians; ancient Irish Bath, or sweating-house, the Tig Allui; Mexican Bath; Moorish Bath; the Hypocaust pp. 5-9 Eastern origin of the bath; Mr. Urquhart's discovery of the vestiges of the Phœnician Bath among the ruins of Baalbeck; Syrian Bath; Gazul, its nature and properties; Gazul and the Strigil derived from Mauritania; probable irradiation of the knowledge of the bath from Phœnicia pp. 9-12