cesses which have been contrived to lengthen out the play at hydropathic institutions, not only as ridiculous, but positively injurious. It has never been pretended that water was unimportant in the treatment of disease—rational medicine has always employed it, and must continue to do so whilst the world stands. Its use may have been improperly limited in some periods, but for a long time past it has been employed with the utmost freedom in the regular practice, and we would encourage its use in every reasonable manner in health and sickness. All the benefits that can be derived from bathing, or the use of water in any other manner, are quite as well understood by scientific physicians as by any German peasants or their disciples, and there is no necessity for any one to go abroad to be washed, and scrubbed, and drenched, at some water-cure manufactory. The quackery does not consist in the proper use of water, but in the empirical scheme that sets it up as an universal remedy, proper to be employed in all diseases, to the exclusion of every other means and without any rational bounds.
