Page:Transactions of the Provincial Medical and Surgical Association, volume 4.djvu/194

 92 the western base (broken into many steep and wooded hills) the roads are generally very bad, indeed, with few exceptions, quite impassable for a carriage in winter; the road and the water course often applying to the same pass. The numerous brooks and streams speedily fill after a few hours rain; are very rapid in their course, tearing up the soil, and accumulating large fragments of loose stones.

These physical circumstances, combined with the greater intercourse which the peasantry of the eastern side have with visitors from the Metropolis and the neighbouring towns, resorting to Malvern and Malvern Wells during the season, contribute to explain the difference observable in the manners (and, as will be hereafter seen) in the statistical results of the population of the parishes in the eastern, as compared with those in the western, division.

4. Waters.—All the springs in the western division retain considerable quantities of earthy salts in solution, particularly carbonate of lime, derived from the extensive lime stone strata whence they arise; indeed, many of the little streams in this division possess a petrifying quality, depositing upon sticks, straws, or moss, lying in them, a tolerably thick covering of the carbonate, which becomes of a stony hardness by exposure to the air.

In the eastern division, almost all the pump waters I have examined are hard; containing, besides lime and minute quantities of other matters, a very notable proportion of magnesia. It is only the springs issuing from the primitive rock, of which there are several on the eastern slope, that possess that character of purity, that freedom from earthy