362 PHILOSOPHICAL TRANSACTIONS. [aNNO 166Q. 



A. It is affirmed here, that the town for the most part is built upon a quag- 

 mire, though the places all about it are very firm ground. Some workmen, 

 that have been employed in digging, have found a mire ten feet deep, without 

 the north-gate, the highest place of the town, at seven. The earth between is 

 a kind of rubbish ; sometimes they find pitching a man's length under ground, 

 and passages for the water to pass ; seven or eight feet down they have met with 

 oyster shells. 



5. The town and circumjacent country generally abound with cold springs; 

 and in some places the hot and cold arise very near each other ; in one place, 

 within two yards, and in others, within eight or nine of the main baths. 



6. The guides of the cross-bath inform me that when there is a great west- 

 wind abroad, standing by the springs they feel a cold air arising from beneath : 

 if the wind be at east, and the morning close with a little misling rain, the cross- 

 bath is so hot as scarcely to be endured, when the king's and hot- baths are 

 colder than usual. In other winds, let the weather be how it will, this bath is 

 temperate. The springs that bubble most are coldest. The cross-bath fills in 

 l6 hours both in winter and summer, without any difference from heat or cold, 

 floods or drought. That of the king's in 12 or 14. 



7. A man may better (ordinarily) endure four hours bathing in the cross- 

 bath than one and a half in the others. In the queen's bath (which has no 

 springs of its own, but comes all out of the king's) they have found under a flat 

 stone, which upon occasion was taken up, a tunnel, and a yielding mud in and 

 under it, into which they thrust a pike, but could feel no bottom. In the king's 

 bath there is a spring so hot, that it is scarce sufFerable, so that they turn much 

 of it away for fear of inflaming the bath. The hottest spring will not harden 

 an t.^^. 



8. The Bath-water does not pass through the body like other mineral waters, 

 but if you put in salt, it purges presently. Upon settlement it affords a black 

 mud, useful in aches, applied by way of cataplasm, to some more successful 

 than the very waters. The like it deposits upon distillation, and no other. Nor 

 has any more been discovered upon all the chemical examinations that have 

 come to our knowledge. One Dr. AstendofF found, that the colour of the salt, 

 drawn from the king's and hot bath, was yellow; that, which was extracted 

 from the cross-bath, white. This doctor concluded, that the cross-bath had 

 more of alum and nitre than the hotter baths, which abound more with sul- 

 phur. * And yet that bath loosens shrunk sinews, by which it should seem it 



* A water containing alum, nitre, and sulphur, would be very different from the Bath mineral 

 waters. 



