should come profundity. The chemist does
not wonder at this evidence of the medicated
character of the contents of the earth's cellar.
The druggist, knows to his loss, that the
interior of the earth is an apothecary's shop,
but having granted that, wonders at the
accuracy with which all the mixtures in it
are made up. To speak with all professional
decorum it may be said, marvel it is, that
each stream or spring should absorb its
definite proportion of solid and gaseous
contents unchangingly through time, so as to
present always, like the ocean or the
atmosphere, that identical character which constitutes
its settled value: a prescription carefully
prepared.

The physical and medicinal properties thus
acquired, have, as before said, from early
times assured to the health-giving waters
popular reverence. Generations after
generations of men have been supplied with their
physic from that subterranean establishment.
Many a votive altar erected at the spot where
a stream first issues to the day, remains in
England, as well as in the south of Europe, to
testify the grateful appreciation of the
Romans; and the beautiful ceremony of well-
flowering, which still takes place annually, in
some few English parishes, is the expression
of a rustic love and gratitude which has
proved as perennial as the spring itself.
The emblematic flowers and songs bestowed
on certain wells in this pleasing custom of
our English ancestors, represent the earlier
rites of worship that were observed at wells
and fountains. According to pagan ideas,
nymphs exclusively presided over wells;
and it is perhaps for this reason, that in
Christian times, so few springs and fountains
came to be dedicated to male saints. An
old Roman writer tells us that " all waters
had their particular nymphs presiding over
them." Everybody has heard of Egeria
and her fountain, not left unsung by Ovid;
and the remains of this celebrated spring,
once sacred to the nymph and the muses,
are, or lately were, existing, in a romantic
spot in the Valley of Egeria. It is through
this valley that the Rio di Appio runs—the
Aqua Mercurii with which the Roman shop-
keepers blessed their goods, and which
seems to have been sacred to Cybele.

Mythical as the gentle deities of the fountain
may seem, there is, at all events, one
instance on record in which the presiding
nymph condescended to appear in person.
About eight miles from Rome, on the Via
Collatina, near to Salone, is the Aqua
Virginia, a spring which, according to Fontinus,
took its name from the apparition there
of a virgin, who pointed out the well to a
body of soldiers. Those thirsty souls, in
return for her favour, built an Ædicula, or
small temple to the nymph of the well, and
honoured her as a divinity. Nor was it
only in Italy that the Romans recognised a
nymph as the presiding genius of a well.
At Bagndres, which has been a favourite
summer retreat from the age of the Caesars
of old to the hour of the Caesars of to-day,
there are votive tablets of the Roman era,
which were dedicated to the nymphs presiding
over streams, and they manifest a gratitude
for health restored, which modern refinement,
it has been justly said, would do well
to imitate, only in a different manner. That
is to say, not by giving heaps of stone to airy
doctors, but to earthy doctors heaps of
pudding. So, too, at Bourbonne-les-bains, a votive
tablet was raised by a Roman consul to the
goddess Vorvonna (honoured by the Gauls as
presiding over mineral springs) for the cure
of his daughter Cocilla; and, indeed, so
numerous are the mineral springs in the
Bourbonnais, that this goddess is supposed to have
even given name to the province, and thus to
the royal family of France. We cannot trace
the etymology to reverence of some great
Doctor Bolus, in commemoration of whose
skill there may have been raised in Père la
Chaise as many tablets as were voted to the
best Vorvonna of them all.

Again,—to come to our own country, two
instances may be given from Yorkshire,—
namely, the inscription that was found on
the banks of the river Greta, near Bowes
the Roman Lavatræ, being a votive offering
by two Roman ladies, in honour of the
nymph Elaune, perhaps, as Professor Phillips
has suggested, the river Lune; and the
votive altar dedicated at Ilkley, the Roman
Olicana, to Verbeia, the nymph or goddess
of the fair impetuous Wharfe.

To the intuitive scent of the prætors and
legionaries of Rome for thermal waters, we
probably owe the knowledge and preservation
of many springs which have given
importance in modern times to a whole
district, and still draw strangers from afar.
The Romans duly honoured the springs of
Bath and Buxton; of the Savoyard Aix;
of Baden, whose waters, known to the Romans
as Thermæ Helveticæ, are still resorted to,
as they were in the days of Aurelian; and of
watering-places now famous in the south
of France. At Luxeuil an inscription
remains, from which we learn that soon after
the conquest of that eastern part of Gaul,
one of the first acts of the conqueror was to
repair the fountains of Lixovium. So, too,
in Trajan's villa, near Civita Vecchia, where
a sulphur-spring rises, hot enough to boil an
egg, is the old bath in which the emperor of
the world reclined. A long-forgotten warm
sulphur-spring, surrounded by remains of
Roman baths and Roman pottery, has lately
been discovered at a place called Thermes,
between Paris and Neuilly. The handsome
modern temple of the springs at
Plombières, is on the site of ancient Roman baths.
Again, Aix, in the department of Bouches du
Rhone, was the seat of an immense Roman
thermal establishment; the principal spring
is even now called after the Proconsul