With few exceptions the London swimming baths are too small. When any considerable number of bathers are in the water, then there is hardly room for the swimmers, who are consequently continually butting against, or kicking, or even scratching one another in a manner anything but favorable for the preservation of good temper—a most essential requisite in a hygienic point of view. None of the London baths have the advantage of pure fresh air. Some of them are close, stuffy and fœtid. The best of them can only be said to be well ventilated, but no amount of ventilation in a covered building is an equivalent for the caller air with its fresh breezes, that play around and about the exposed body of the open air bather. Few of the London baths have a sufficiency of light. Some are mere gloomy cellars. In the very best of them the body does not receive the direct rays of the sun, the light being transmitted through glass of greater or less thickness, often artificially dimmed, in case it should impinge too strongly on the exposed body. The powerful hygienic effects of light on the body have recently received much attention, and it is no doubt a chief agent in the salubrious influence of open-air bathing. To construct a swimming bath where the light is nearly excluded is to forego one of the greatest advantages of the bath. Lastly, how can the mind remain free from anxiety, when, according to the arrangement in every bath in London, with one exception, the bather’s clothes and valuables have to be left in open boxes, to which any person can enter, while in most baths a notice is stuck up to the effect that the bath proprietor is not responsible for clothes or valuables, but that each bather must look after his own. In some of the baths the ticket givers will take charge of watches, jewellery, and money, but in many others they refuse to do so, and one is forced to leave everything exposed. With this alarming notice staring one in the face, what must be the state of mind of a timid bather under such circumstances, when the bath is tolerably full of the extremely mixed company which frequents these baths, I shall leave the reader to imagine. Certainly if the conditions were otherwise hygienically good, the moral state thus induced would suffice to neutralize them. Besides the above swimming baths, cold and tepid, under cover, and not to be enjoyed without payment, London has, or had, two large open-air gratuitous swimming baths, fulfilling in many respects the requirements of hygienic swimming baths, but objectionable in several important particulars; I allude to the great bathing lake in Hyde Park—the Serpentine, and the two smaller lakes in Victoria Park.