But in

always rational, though common among us, to send our invalids annually to Italy, or to the southern parts of France. Is the deadening sirrocco wind, which is immediately succeeded by a tramontana, the bise, or, in short, the variable extremes of hot and cold air, which one is exposed to in the neighbourhood of the Alps and Apennines, the salubrious stream by which a sick man should be surrounded? Sudden atmospherical transitions are most pernicious to human nature. In every climate, they are injurious to the frame. In England, indeed, which is temperate, their influence is generally exerted on the relaxed and weak. England, who does not feel the easterly wind? "At Lausanne," says Dr. Moseley," Tissot told me, the transitions from heat to cold are there sometimes so great, that invalids and convalescents feel considerable ill effects from them; and that in pulmonic disorders, those changes have produced the most dangerous consequences. Why then expatriate one sick person? Why separate him from his friends, and hurry him into a climate more fickle, and consequently more unwholesome than his own? Towns, within the reach of winds from the Alps, Apennines, Pyrenees, and other high mountains, at some seasons of the year, are graves to people who re

I.

sort

sort to them, in decays of the lungs. In those scrophulous and consumptive habits, to which our atmosphere is inimical, sea voyages should be made, and islands should be resorted to, where the climate is uniformly warm; such as Madeira or others still in warmer latitudes, which have been known to succeed better. Few diseases originate in England, for which the climate of England, with change of place, is not equal to any other. Foreigners have an erroneous notion of our climate. Perhaps our atmosphere is not mild enough for the tender fibres of weak bodies; but, take it for all and all, there is not a better climate on the habitable globe. For by what fairer comparison is a climate to be estimated, than by the corporeal and mental faculties of those who are nurtured in it; and in which almost every species of animal arrives to the utmost perfection? *

But, I now will take my leave, and sum up our aerial dissertation in the words of a celebrated physician."It is supposed, and I believe justly, that more of the offensive particles. are swept off by the air which has been received into the lungs, than from the whole surface of the body besides: and this is the reason, why the

Ꭲ 4

• Dr. Moseley.

† Adair.

air

air we breathe is so soon contaminated, and rendered unfit for the support of life; and this in proportion to the air being less pure, previously to its being inspired; because thus tainted, it is sooner saturated with the noxious matter it takes up in the air cells of the lungs, and therefore carries off a smaller proportion in a given time: whereas, a purer air would unite with, suspend, and discharge a larger quantity, and thereby prevent the dangerous effects of their retention. Hence it is, that a moderately cold and dry air is the most wholesome: for the lungs, like the funnel of a stove, discharge the foul air, by means of the cool air admitted by every inspiration.

LET

any

LETTER XXII.

FROM fire and air we now naturally turn to the element of water. Water, in general, implies a pellucid fluid, convertible into ice by cold. at 32 degrees of Farenheit's thermometer, naturally pervading the strata of the earth, and flowing or stagnating on its surface. It is usually divided into two general kinds, the simple and medicinal. Simple or pure water, in the strictest sense of the word, is not met with where. Heterogeneous matter, and that in a large quantity, may be separated from such as appears the purest and most simple. But we include, in a more general manner, under the first of these terms, all those waters which have no smell or taste of any extraneous matter, nor any, particular effect on the body; and under the latter we include all those whose smell, taste, or other obvious qualities, denote their containing saline, metalline, or other mineral particles in them, and whose effects on the body correspond with these notices of their contents. In a word, we may look upon that water as most pure,

which is limpid, without colour or smell, breaks soap readily, boils pulse soon and tender, which freezes readily, and does not encrust the bottom or sides of vessels in which it is boiled. And hence the water which is raised in vapour, and as it were distilled by nature, is of the purer kind; whilst that from ice is the purest of any, as the grosser mineral and heterogeneous particles which all waters contain in a greater or less degree, are probably excluded. The sailors to the Greenland Whale Fishery, who for many months have no other than ice water to drink, have always found it so. Our intrepid and celebrated countryman, Captain Cooke, brought this to an indisputable certainty.

In the sublime arrangement of the elementary principles of nature, the Almighty Ruler of the whole, we may with humility conclude, did not, in the separation of the respective masses, render the two oceans of water and air, so wholly discordant from each other, as that they should be incapable of contracting an union: On the contrary, they have such a disposition to unite, that it has long seemed to ingenious men, that they have had a common origin, and that if it were not for the intervention of heat, they would probably unite, and again compose a

common