luxurious men will be as choice over their
water as they now are over their wine, and
when no invalid who can obtain the most
ordinary comforts of life will ever think of
pouring hard water into his stomach.

Water from granites, clay slates, and millstone
grits, seldom contains more than two grains,
and in some cases but half a grain, of lime to
the gallon. The people of Aberdeen and Glasgow,
Keswick, Whitehaven, Lancaster, and
Manchester, drink water in which the admixture
of lime is below four grains to the gallon.
Give London something of this kind. Only let
us clear about twenty thousand tons of lime out
of our yearly supply, and let us use smoke-consuming
fires, and the freshened complexions of
London ladies will become quite as inspiring
to the poets, as the cheeks of the country
Chloes. It is said to be a fact that beautiful
women most abound in soft-water districts. The
poets always knew this. Moore, when he sings
of the beauties of Cashmere, calls them, with
a pleasant mixture of the lackadaisical and the
practical, bright creatures of the valley, who

Drink beams
Of beauty from its founts and streams.

The clay slate valley of the Dee, the clay slate
and granite lake regions of Cumberland, and the
Scotch Highlands, have a standing credit for
the clear-skinned maids who dwell about them.
Among the Alpine oolites and limestones, we find
pallid faces, wens, and cretinism. Vegetables
are of one mind with animals as to the wholesome
sort of drinking water. Foxgloves grow seven
feet high where they drink sweet water off clay
slate; upon limestone, they seldom attain to
more than half that height.

Some waters, holding carbonate of lime in
solution, may be softened by boiling. This is
the case with Thames water, and all water from
chalk. Water, hardened by sulphate of lime,
becomes yet harder by boiling, in proportion to
the extent of the evaporation. Soft waters are
vapid and dull to the taste of hard-water-
drinkers. Animals of all kinds dislike any
change of water. Sudden change may be
injurious to men. Armies of hard-water-drinkers
have, during a march, had many of their number
prostrated by the drinking of soft water; to the
great solvent power of which the stomach is
unused,and it produces spasms. This does not happen
because soft water is unwholesome, but because
hard-water-drinking has become, as smoking
may become, an established habit, difficult to
break off suddenly. Liverpool people object to
the peat taint on the pure surface water with
which they are now supplied. Of the soft-
water-drinking towns already named, Lancaster
gets water, nearly pure, from millstone grit,
and Keswick, from the clay slate of Skiddaw,
which receives water fresh from the clouds
almost of the standard softness of distilled
water.

Londoners may drink good water if they first
boil and then filter what is supplied to them,
having set it in pure air to cool. Pure water,
as bel'ore said, dissolves and absorbs eagerly.
Any water in a foul cistern, or in a cistern near
a dustbin, over a drain, or connected by the
waste-pipe with a foul drain, must become
unwholesome. The old cry of "The wells are
poisoned!" in case of an epidemic, is commonly
a true cry still; only the poisoning has to be laid
no longer on the Jews. Lately, in Salford
gaol, a peculiar sickness seized upon a number
of the prisoners. The medical officer traced this
to the water. A cistern, of which the waste-
pipe led to the sewers, had been covered in.
During hot and dry weather, the foul gases from
the sewers were conveyed by the waste-pipe to
the surface of the cistern, and, being retained
there by the cistern lid, were absorbed in such
quantity as to impregnate the whole contents
very nearly up to immediate poisoning point.
The connexion between bad water and cholera
is known to all. So is, or so should be, the risk
of poison incurred by the passage of soft water
over lead. Soft water— so hungry that it will
even digest stone— has, in short, to be preserved
with special care, from contact with whatever is
unwholesome.

A glass of spring water is an article turned
out by sea, sky, and earth, and worked upon
their grandest scale under the eye of the sun.
The less it is of the earth earthy, the better for
those who require more of it than mere eye
service.

CREAM OF TARTARY.

IF the reader will take the trouble to glance
at a map of Russia, he will find at the southern
extremity of the province Jenisseisk a district
called Minussinsk. This district is fertile in
stories, which we will agree to call Tartar— or
Tatar, if you will— without being too nice as to
the propriety of the expression. Dr. Macgowan
told me the other day, in one of his lectures on
Japan, that there was no such thing as a Tartar,
and if he meant that a number of races, each
with a proper appellation of its own, have been
classified with no rhyme and little reason under
the common name of Tartar, I perfectly agree
with him. But I think we shall express
ourselves more accurately if we say that there was
formerly a section of the Mongols to whom the
word Tartar properly belonged, and that
consequently there was once a real Tartar whose name
has been hastily bestowed upon his most distant
relations.

From the spot to which we refer, the
indefatigable philologist, Alexander Castrén, brought
several local stories; and the collection thus
formed has since been increased by W. Titow,
the agent of the Imperial Geographical Society
of Russia. To Western Europe the knowledge
attained by these investigations into the varieties
of the Altaic family is communicated through
the medium of Anton Schiefner, who, in the
most loving and reverential spirit, translates all
the works of the admirable Castrén into
German, and is himself an ardent philologist. Now,
in the course of last year, Anton Schiefner
published a collection of the Tartar tales discovered