Page:Essay on the mineral waters of Carlsbad (1835).pdf/56

 canthari, seidlini, nosellini, etc. A celebrated Bohemian historian, Balbin (Miscell. Lib. I. c. 24), tells us, in 1697, that the Carlsbad beakers did not contain more than two ounces and a half of liquid. The coffee-cup, of Saxon porcelain, kept in the National Museum of Prague, out of which the Austrian empress Elisabeth, princess of Brunswic-Wolffenbüttel, wife of Charles VI, drank our waters in 1721, contains only four ounces and two drachms of liquid. (Almanach, for 1831, ch. XXII).

The season begins, with few exceptions, the 1st of May, and finishes with September. Our waters acting not only upon the bowels and kidneys, but promoting perspiration, and requiring of course warm weather, June, July and August are always at Carlsbad the fullest time of the season. Those who are fond of a brilliant crowd, and not afraid of paying higher prices for lodgings, should come from the 15th of June to the 15th of August; but those to whom a bustling life is rather an annoyance than a pleasure, should be here from the 1st of May to the 15th of June, or from the 15th of August to the 30th of September. Society, in the beginning and towards the end of the season, being much less numerous, invalids can enjoy the comforts of a quiet life, and they meet with fewer opportunities to transgress the laws of the cure, the length of which varies from five to six weeks, and is even, according to circumstances, continued still longer, sometimes also interrupted by a pause or an excursion, and