Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: SECTION B. DESCRIPTION OF THE PRINCIPAL MINERAL SPRINGS. We now proceed to give some account of the chiet mineral springs, arranged in alphabetical order. The less important ones will be found in smaller type at the end of each alphabetical group. Aix la Chapelle (Aachen), now united with Borcette (Burtscheid) into one community (Aachen- Burtscheid), is a well-known thermal sulphur bath, situated on the railway between Brussels and Cologne, and conveniently accessible from London in eleven or twelve hours. Aachen is now a large town with about 140,000 inhabitants ; it is pleasantly situated, at an elevation of 530 feet, on the slopes of the Lousberg, and is surrounded by wooded hills ranging from 750 to 1,120 feet high. It lies on the western frontier of Germany, on the borders ol Holland and Belgium. The soil on which it is built is of porous sand, which readily absorbs heavy downfalls of rain, leaving the streets and paths quickly dry again. It has a medium temperate climate, not very hot in summer, and the cold ol winter is said to be mitigated by the heat given into the atmosphere by the hot springs. Its history as a bath stretches back into a remote antiquity. Charlemagne, whose remains repose in its cathedral, has been regarded not only as the founder of the town but as the discoverer ot the springs, but there exist evidences (relics of the stone age) near the hot springs that they were used by the primitive inhabitants of the country; there are also ruins of Roman baths, showing that they were utilised in later times by the Romans. The characteristic components of the numerous springs are sodium chloride and sodium sulphide, together with sulphuretted hydrogen; they differ only in temperature and the relative amounts of the sulphur compounds they contain. ...