Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 29.djvu/528

512 each class there is a descriptive name. The French forests are the best cared for in the world, and, whenever we are ready to cultivate and preserve our own, we shall have the advantage of French experience in this important matter.

The springs are fifteen in number, bearing names that come down, in some instances, from the Roman era. The Bains des Benedictins, des Capucins, des Dames, des Fleurs, are among the most used, flowing as they do under the roof of a single establishment with four others, the Bain gradué, the Grand Bain, the Bain des Cuvettes, and the Bain ferrugineux.

The establishment itself is a fine, old-fashioned building, very spaciously and solidly built, more than a hundred years ago, in the gray stone of the country, and much enlarged in the year 1853. It stands in the middle of a park, shut in on either hand by rows of magnificent oak and plane trees. The establishment lies like an island in the inland sea of hills and meadows which make up this region in the department of the Haute-Saône. They are the last northward-rolling undulations of the Jura.

I will not enumerate the douches, the piscines, the shower and plunge baths, nor the score of appliances which go to make up the installation or plant of this fine establishment. These appliances are, indeed, much the same in all the great European watering-places, and their elaborate complexity is a thing that interests one upon the spot, rather than in the description of it. Taking all this balneological battery, then, for granted, let me come to the description of the waters themselves and of their virtues.

They are thermal, ranging from 28° to 51·5° C. (82° to 125° Fahr.). They are abundant in quantity, and in quality they are of two classes: they are either predominantly saline or predominantly iron-manganese. Chemically speaking, they are mild waters; they are none the less very effective therapeutically. Some of the mildest mineral waters, both at home and abroad, are the most valuable.

And for what classes of complaints are the springs of Luxeuil especially indicated? There is no obscurity about the answer; and it will be an encouraging one to many sufferers.

The waters of Luxeuil are especially adapted to anaemia and to the complaints that arise from it; and especially to the nervous, as distinguished from the scrofulous, forms of anaemia. Need I say more to indicate the point I am coming at? The tired housekeeper who is breaking down from work and worry, the jaded society-woman whose rounds of fatiguing pleasures have impaired her nerves and her temper—nearly all, indeed, who represent our domestic types of worry, exhaustion, and nervous debility, especially in women, or who suffer from the still graver derangements of special functions which these involve—these are the preappointed visitors to Luxeuil. For such sufferers its waters are, I will not say exactly a fountain of youth, for our