IOWA ACADEMY OF SCIENCE 
195 
ally used. All natural waters are more or less mineralized and in 
this sense they are mineral waters. As commonly used, however, 
the term is applied to such waters as are supposed to have special 
medicinal value. 
The writer firmly believes that in this sense “mineral waters” 
and the traffic in them are to be placed in the same class with 
patent medicines. He believes that the best waters are those 
which contain moderately small amounts of the usual mineral con- 
stituents, and are as free as possible from bacteria of disease and 
all forms of contamination. It is very probable that the beneficial 
effects derived from mineral waters are indirect. In some cases 
it must be admitted, that undue acidity of the stomach, and of the 
urine and a low alkalinity of the blood or the secretions may be cor- 
rected by alkaline waters. In a very few waters enough lithium has 
been found to give some medicinal benefit, perhaps, if the patient 
persistently drank the water to the full extent of his capacity. Of 
the indirect influences are, the faith element, the freedom from 
business and other worry and work when visiting mineral springs 
sanitariums, the early morning walk to the springs and the cleans- 
ing of the stomach by generous draughts of water before breakfast. 
Recently the Department of Agriculture made analyses of about 
fifty of the best known commercial mineral waters and published 
the results in Bulletin 91 of the chemical series. It is interesting to 
compare some of these analyses with those of Iowa waters. With 
the exception of a few salt waters and a few highly carbonated 
waters to which there are no analogues in Iowa as already stated, 
also two or three waters with high lithium contents, all the other 
mineral waters can be paralleled in all essential respects over and 
over again, by Iowa waters. In order to show the compositions of 
a number of Iowa waters and also to compare them with the 
commercial mineral waters I have constructed three tabular state- 
ments. Table (7) shows light mineral waters in comparison with 
what may be considered normal waters of similar amounts of min- 
eral constituents, taken from Lake Michigan and the drive wells 
at Atlantic, Iowa. So far as the mineral matter is concerned there 
is no evident reason why one should prefer one water rather than 
the other. 
Table (8) shows moderately mineralized commercial waters and 
their Iowa parallels. It may be observed that the famous Buffalo 
Lithia water contains .04 part of lithium, which would require one 
to drink 800 liters to get the medicinal dose. Lithium occurs in 
some Iowa waters also but so far as known its amount has not 
