Almost all the swimming baths are the head quarters of one or more swimming clubs, which generally have one night a week for their meetings and practisings. With few exceptions they have all attached to them a professional swimmer, in most cases one of the bath attendants, who teaches swimming to beginners and coaches aspirants after prizes in that extraordinary mode of rapid swimming adopted by the London aquatic athletes, in plunging, in picking up eggs from the bottom of the bath, and other equally useless feats. The shallowness of the baths prevents all practice of the really useful accomplishment of diving deep in water from a height or while swimming; and I am not aware of any instruction being given in the very difficult art of rescuing a drowning person. I need not say that this is a dangerous and difficult operation as long as the person to be rescued is able to struggle and clutch at his rescuer. It too often happens that the desperate efforts of a drowning person drag both himself and his would-be preserver to the bottom. In some books it is recommended not to attempt the rescue of a drowning man until he has ceased to struggle, when it may be too late. There is a method of grasping and supporting a drowning person, however lively, that should be taught to swimmers, which will enable them to save life without much peril to themselves; and this could be taught in our swimming baths, but no prizes are awarded for it, and professionals, for the most part, think only of teaching what will win prizes at the swimming competitions. By the way, either Shakspeare understood little about swimming or he intended to represent Cassius as a vain boaster, which, however, is hardly consistent with his character in the play, when he makes him talk about rescuing the drowning Cæsar by taking him on his shoulders as Æneas did Anchises.