Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 29.djvu/527

Rh afterward a sedative effect. A bath of an hour and a half will slow the circulation, and depress the muscular forces; but the baths are not now prescribed of such length as formerly.

And their virtues? They are employed with success in the following classes of ailments:

(a.) Flatulent and acid dyspepsias, with atony of the digestive system.

(b.) Rheumatism and gout.

(c.) Female complaints, especially neuralgia and engorgement of the uterus.

(d.) Chronic neuralgias of various kinds. Dr. Liétard, the courteous inspector, and Drs. Leclère, Bottentuit, and Daviller, are among the most prominent consulting physicians of the place.

I should add that the environs of Plombières are very attractive. The village has about eighteen hundred inhabitants; it stands where the railroad ceases to climb the valley of the Augronne, and its two or three pretty streets hang along the sides of the valley like terraces, here and there connected by steep stairways built in the hill-side and leading from one level to another.

There are pretty excursions, as everywhere in this part of France. The Ferme Jacquot, the Fontaine Stanislas, the valley of the Semouze, the Val d'Ajol, Hérival and its ruins, Saint-Etienne, a curious town of the seventh century, and the picturesque city of Remiremont, mountain-girdled, with the ruins of the ancient abbey—these are among the places to see. For a longer excursion, one should spend two days in visiting Gérardmer and the mountain-lake, high among the Vosges. But I need not specify any more pretty places in a country which is so beautiful as the east of France.

—This is a pleasant little town, about three thousand years old, near the new Alsatian boundary of France, an afternoon's drive from Plombières. In spite of thirty centuries' growth, it has not as yet touched the round number of four thousand inhabitants, though during the season, from the 15th of May to the end of September, the place is flooded with guests. Luxeuil lies in a rolling country—not a mountainous one, but at an elevation (1,325 feet above sea-level) that gives cool, sometimes chilly, summer nights. The climate, however, is not a variable one, and one sleeps soundly at night at Luxeuil.

Judged by an American standard, its temperatures are equable, and their uniformity is increased by the protection which Luxeuil finds in a range of hills upon the north, covered with ancient forests—the haute futaie of the French classification. There, as elsewhere in France, the forestry department takes account of each tree in the forests, and they are classified according to their ages with systematic accuracy. The ages that divide the classes are forty, sixty, one hundred and twenty, two hundred, and lastly over two hundred years; and for