completed the exercise. This, it seems, is the method best adapted to preserve the skin.

Neither bathe immediately after a full meal, nor stand shivering when the bath is over, if you would avoid injury. These precautions are necessary to be taken in sea bathing.

THE AMERICAN CLIMATE.

Johannes Schoepf, the surgeon of the Anspach Bayreuth troops in America during the war of the Revolution, wrote a fierce diatribe against the American climate when he got home. He had more leisure to write it there. The Hessians could not whip the Americans, but they might at least abuse their climate. Americans, however, have managed to bear up under it with tolerable complacency for a century, in ignorance of the existence of such a book, until Dr. Chadwick, of Boston, translated it a year or two ago, and let in a little light; and now it is too late to stem the tide of immigration. Dr. Schoepf was of opinion that a country that froze a man solid in winter and melted him liquid in summer was a very poor country to emigrate to; and if I had been "taken in and done for" as the Hessians were in New Jersey I might not yield even to Schoepf in ferocity of invective against the beastly

and inhospitable climate which heaven gave the Western world. I have felt some faint beginnings of anathemas at two o'clock in the afternoon some days last August, and several such symptoms on very many Augusts preceding, and I am very sure the disposition was strong on some spring mornings when winter ought to have been over, but was not.

No one need suffer in any part of this country because the climate does not suit him, if he has money to travel; for whether he shall seek humidity or drouth, the sea level or the mountain top, the forest or the arid plain, he may find the object of his search within the boundaries of the United States and under the protection of its flag. The invalid, however, should choose his objective point after consultation with his physician, rather than by flying off hurriedly to an inappropriate climate, to find his malady aggravated. The bones of climatic victims whiten the cemeteries of many

famous health resorts, simply because that particular climate was the one of all others worst adapted to those particular cases. It is now possible, by reason of the accurately-kept meteorological records of the Signal Service, to determine the relative moisture or dryness of almost any given place for five years quite long enough to show the average. Other things being equal, the place that can show a record of the greatest number of sunshiny days will be found to have the most equable climate, both as regards humidity and temperature.

The memory is a very uncertain thing to trust when the state of the weather for any given period is under consideration; and it is a common observation that that ubiquitous individual, the "oldest inhabitant," never has seen such weather as the present. But the record, when investigated, fails to bear him out, for there is much less variation at any given place from year to year than is commonly supposed.

OF EPIDEMICS.

There has been no considerable period of time in the world's history unmarked by an epidemic of one sort or another. From the time of the Hippocratic writings down to the present, the histories of the various epidemics have formed an important part of literature. Thucydides' account of the great Athenian plague, Boccacio's chapter on that of Florence in 1348, De Foe's masterpiece on the London plague of 1664-'65, will ever stand as graphic specimens of, shall I say, pestilential literature. But the histories of human suffering will never be lost, nor the record blotted out; so that, what was mankind's pain, became in time the study of the literati.

Illinois may be cited as a typical example of the prosperous agricultural State. Her debt is practically extinguished, and the income from the Central Railroad pays a large share of the expense