Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 15.djvu/641

 of temperate habits, is intimately associated with the cigarette or cigar. Only by the uncultured classes of Great Britain and of other northern nations, who appear to possess the most insensitive palates in Europe, have smoke and alcoholic drinks been closely associated. By such, tobacco and spirit have been sought chiefly as drugs, and are taken mainly for their effects on the nervous system—the easy but disastrous means of becoming stupid, besotted, or drunk. People of cultivated tastes, on the other hand, select their tobacco or their wines, not for their qualities as drugs, but for those subtler attributes of flavor and perfume, which exist often in inverse proportion to the injurious narcotic ingredients; which latter are as much as possible avoided, or are accepted chiefly for the sake of the former.

Before quitting the subject of dining it must be said that, after all, those who drink water with that meal probably enjoy food more than those who drink wine. They have generally better appetite and digestion, and they certainly preserve an appreciative palate longer than the wine-drinker. Water is so important an element to them, that they are not indifferent to its quality and source. As for the large class which can not help itself in this matter, the importance of an ample supply of uncontaminated water can not be overrated. The quality of that which is furnished to the population of London is inferior, and the only mode of storing it possible to the majority renders it dangerous to health. Disease and intemperance are largely produced by neglect in relation to these two matters. It would be invidious, perhaps, to say what particular question of home or foreign politics could be spared, that Parliament might discuss a matter of such pressing urgency as a pure water-supply; or to specify what particular part of our enormous expenditure, compulsory and voluntary, might be better employed than at present, by diverting a portion to the attainment of that end. But for those who can afford to buy water no purer exists in any natural sources than that of our own Malvern springs, and these are aerated and provided in the form of soda and potash waters of unexceptionable quality. Pure water, charged with gas, does not keep so long as a water to which a little soda or potash is added; but for this purpose six to eight grains in each bottle suffice—a larger quantity is undesirable. All the great makers of these beverages have now their own artesian wells or other equally trustworthy sources, so that English aerated waters are unrivaled in excellence. On the other hand, the foreign siphon, made, as it often is, at any chemist's shop, and from the water of the nearest source, is a very uncertain production. Probably our traveling fellow countrymen owe their attacks of fever more to drinking water contaminated by sewage matter than to the malarious influences which pervade certain districts of southern Europe. The only water safe for the traveler to drink is a natural mineral water, and such is now always procurable throughout Europe, except in very remote or unfrequented