them attached to their villas. Not Rome alone, but other Italian cities, adopted the institution. Successive emperors vied with each other in providing them for the people, erecting for the purpose buildings of stupendous size. These sometimes contained halls supported by magnificent columns, lined with precious marbles, and adorned with fine mosaics and statuary. Theatres, libraries, and places for athletic sports were sometimes included in the same pile that afforded beautiful colonnades open to interior blooming courts, provided with seats, where philosophers or men of affairs could rest or stroll about at pleasure.

In the Roman bath of the most sumptuous kind there was the apartment in which the bather disrobed; the tepid apartment, that in which the body was sprinkled to remove perspiration; the apartment in which hot-air and hot-vapor baths could be taken, where there was a warm bath; and the cool apartment, in which was the swimming-pool. This pool, in the baths of Diocletian, was 200 feet in length and 100 in width. The Mohammedans long subsequently adopted this kind of bath from the Romans, and through them it spread into Spain and various other countries. The reader may remember that, in the" Arabian Nights," Aladdin first sees the Princess Balroubadour as she goes attended to the bath.

The process of bathing in the Roman therma was like that with which we are acquainted in our similar baths, except, as already mentioned, that some persons took only the cold bath of the swimming-pool. The Romans, however, did not possess soap, and used the strigil, or sharp scraper of bone, ivory, or metal, for the same purpose for which we use the much better adapted flesh-brush or flesh-glove. As compared with us, however, they more than made up for these disadvantages by the frequency of their bathing. The most magnificent of their baths. were those of Agrippa, Nero, Titus Domitian, Commodus, Caracalla, Diocletian, and Constantine.

If demagogism in Rome sometimes degraded the people by giving them magnificent bribes for their liberty, in the case of the baths good certainly came out of evil. Demagogueism is not yet dead in the world, but unselfish generosity was never so much alive to the good of the people as in the present era. It is not too much to say that it could not have a worthier task than the institution of public baths for all seasons of the year, scattered at proper intervals over the area of our great cities,—such baths as London and even little Glasgow can now boast, in connection with which the best laundry facilities can be procured for a trifle by the poorest women. A philanthropist who should, at the present stage of our civilization, supply this need of cleanliness, and additionally, in the form involving the healthful exercise of swimming, would do more for the souls of the people than his expenditure of an equal amount for any other good purpose could accomplish. The gift would yield in return wide-spread increase of health and comfort, and afford legitimate vent to pent-up nervous energies, which, in the life of a large city, are somewhere always verging upon dangerous explosion.

CHAPTER XVII.

THE CLEANSING OF THE FACE.

T may, without due reflection, seem to some persons prepos

IT

terous that any one should need instructions as to the care of the face. But experience shows that there is nothing which has not escaped the observation or the opportunities of learning of some people. In ancient Rome people were taught to chew and otherwise eat properly,-a line of instruction which would not be amiss at present, if many only knew their deficiency in the matter. We have seen in the course of our travels instances of disgusting eating, the most egregious of which was at a respectable hotel, where a man, with a bib made out of his napkin, dripped soup over it from the eaves of a huge untrimmed moustache, which he occasionally combed out with his fork. We occasionally see girls, tricked out in the height of the fashion, affectedly laugh so as to let one see down their throats. Yet eating and laughing are two natural movements in which superficial observers suppose that no human being can possibly need instruction.

In the first place, in regard to the proper care of the face, it is to be observed that no beauty of it can be based upon any. thing short of the healthfulness of its skin, and that no healthfulness of its skin can be secured by face-powders or face-lotions, or anything short of the detersive effects of good soap and water and mild friction. Simple, however, as this statement is, it needs. amplification to make sure of no misconception arising from it. If one were to wash the face and hands in very warm or in hot water, and then expose them to cold air, both would become red, roughened, chapped, and coarse, as we see every day, in an exaggerated form, in the effects produced on the hands of servant

girls who wash outdoors with a bucketful of steaming-hot water, with the temperature of the air at or below the freezing-point. If, on the contrary, the temperature of the room in which the face and hands are to be washed is high, and there is to be no exposure of them for some time to the cold air, one can wash them with impunity in warm or even in hot water. With impunity, we say, but not preferably, for very warm or hot water has not upon the skin the desirable tonic effect of cool water, which tends, through its action upon the nerves and capillaries, to improve it in health and beautify it.

When we wish to remove from the skin some mass of foreign matter, we use warm or hot water, but why? Not because they are as good as cold water for the health of the skin, but because the foreign matter is more soluble in warm or hot water than in cool; because, under the influence of heat, the interstices of the skin where the matter has securest lodgment are expanded; and because the skin itself, being more macerated by warm than by cool water, readily yields up some of the foreign matter with the albumen of the skin itseif. In a word, our object is different, when we ordinarily wash, from our object when we are trying to get rid of a mass of adherent foreign matter. The conditions being different, the object becomes different, and, correspondingly, the means to be adopted.

It is only by the use of cool water that we increase the health and beauty of the skin. We use warm water in the bath, but we should not prefer it but for the fact that we should be chilled by the use of cool water in a bath of some duration. If the circumstances were those of nature, enabling us to take exercise in the bath, if we could swim there, we should find the cool bath even more agreeable than the warm,-more tonic, and refreshing. The adoption of warm water instead of cool for the ordinary bath is a very judicious recognition of the fact of the difference between ability and non-ability to keep up the circula

tion of the blood by exercise. The best bath, therefore, that can be taken under the conditions of house-bathing is one of tepid water, followed by a shower-bath of the same temperature, gradually cooled down to one giving a feeling of decided coldness, followed immediately by a brisk rubbing down with towels. By this means the tonic effect of a river-bath, without the exercise, is obtained with even a greater detersive effect. There is, however, in the exhilarating influence of a bath, accompanied by exercise in the open air, one tonic effect upon the system which is necessarily lost indoors.

Now, the same considerations that cause us to adopt for a bath, when no exercise is taken, a certain degree of warmth, to compensate for the absence of exercise, do not apply at all to surfaces so small as those represented by the face and hands. Hence, for the face and hands we may always avail ourselves of the tonicity of cool water on the skin for promoting their health and beauty. The immediate effect, especially in winter (when the skin as well as the whole body has its winter temperament), of applying warm or hot water to the skin, is to engorge the capillaries and make the parts turgid. The blood being invited, by the expansion of the capillaries through heat, to flow to the surface, without any correspondent reflex tendency being given to it, they for some time afterward remain relaxed, distended, and engorged with blood. Observe the very different action of cool water, and it will be perceived why its application should be followed by a positively tonic effect. The blood moves rapidly in two directions, away from and toward the surface. In this case, therefore, while the parts have not been temporarily altered, their functions have been agreeably stimulated; whereas in the other case the parts have been temporarily altered, and their functions temporarily disturbed. It is readily seen that from one set of conditions the effect must be tonic, and from the other depressant.