Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 19.djvu/34

24 the invention of gunpowder diminished the importance of personal prowess, our anti-natural dogmas accomplished their tendency in the rapid physical corruption of their devotees. The dull and gloomy slavery of the monasteries was transferred to the management of all educational institutions; for several centuries the bodily rights of the poor convent-pupils were not only disregarded but willfully depreciated. Educational influences became the chief cause of physical degeneracy, and the superficialness of our reformatory measures proves that we have not yet recognized the root of the evil.

But the voice of Nature has repeated its protest in the yearnings of every new generation. Our children still long for outdoor life, for active exercise, for the free development of every bodily faculty; and, if we cease to suppress those instincts, the regenerative tendency of Nature will soon assert itself, and the time may come when man will be once more the physical as well as mental superior of his fellow-creatures.

 

SIDE from the rich field for scientific research that the mineral springs of Saratoga present to the student of natural phenomena, the majority of the members of this Association are undoubtedly interested to a greater or less extent in a product that forms, with many, a large, important, and increasing item of trade, there being probably no one class of mineral waters of domestic production, or from any one locality, that are used to so great an extent as those from Saratoga Springs. On this account, as well as for the reason that our Association holds its twenty-eighth annual meeting in this village, where an opportunity is afforded of personally inspecting the source of supply of these waters, it will, perhaps, not prove uninteresting to present some facts regarding an article that has contributed so largely to the prosperity of Saratoga in the past, and upon which its future interests to a great degree depend.

Saratoga Springs is an incorporated village, having a resident population of about ten thousand, which is largely augmented during the summer season. It has an altitude of three hundred and five feet above tide-water, is one hundred and eighty-eight miles north of New York City, on the line of the Rensselaer and Saratoga Railroad, and is situated in and on either side of a valley extending from northeast to southwest. Prior to 1767 little or nothing was known by the whites regarding the waters of this section. In August of that year Sir 