At Harrogate all who live at the Hotels, have the convenience of a table d'hôte. From experience I can recommend that at the Crown; and from what I have heard visitors of consequence say respecting them, those at the other hotels are equally entitled to praise.

At all the principal hotels, whether of Low or High Harrogate, the banqueting-rooms or saloons in which the dinner takes place, are large, well appointed, and admit of the enjoyment of a band at dinner-time. There are also withdrawing and separate sitting-rooms for the company, the former of which are common to all who sit at the table d'hôte, whether resident in the hotels, or simply accidental visitors.

The living is not much more reasonable at Harrogate than in London. Bread tolerably white and well flavoured, and butter indifferently good, sell at precisely the same high prices. The milk, owing to the meagre pasturage in the neighbourhood, is poor and thin, and the cream scanty. Mutton is excellent, and eightpence per pound. Fruit, particularly strawberries, is plentiful, but at no lower price than in London.

In fact, though a rural Spa, Harrogate has all the domestic inconvenience of a town one. The reason is plain enough. In the first place, all the supplies, indifferent as they are, come principally from Knaresborough; and in the second place, about six or seven large hotels, four of which, as I before observed, are first-rate ones, have to provide at a weekly charge (which, individually, is very reasonable) board for at least one hundred guests each day. They, therefore, absorb all the provisions that can be gathered in the neighbourhood. Mutton and poultry, and the most preferable or choice vegetables, are quickly snapped up by them; and even the fish, as it makes its rare appearance in the market from Scarborough, is instantly appropriated; so that the dwellers in private houses or in lodgings stand a poor chance of getting any thing good or cheap, or enough of it even to satisfy the pretension of cookery.

Hence families who propose to live in separate houses, and to "keep house," must not expect to live at Harrogate for much less than at Harrogate, had their doctors sent them thither from the metropolis for a change of air.

And yet of the two, a private family, if at all numerous, had better have their ménage in a separate house, than live at an hotel, even at the risk of being looked upon as stingy, and of the common herd ; a stigma they are very likely to have cast upon them.

At an hotel the ordinary charge for lodging and board at the public-table, is two guineas and a half a week, with half a guinea more for the servants of the house, whom you are cense to employ. If you have a servant of your own in livery, then the charge is three shillings and sixpence per day extra; besides which there is a tax of three shillings a week for wax lights.

All this together, making a total of either three pounds six shillings without a servant, or five pounds per week with one, is bearable for one or two persons; but let a Chef and his lady, like some friends I knew in one of the principal private houses, with three young ladies and three servants, take up his residence at the Granby for example, and a sum of not less than twenty guineas a week would have been required, even though using the public-rooms, without being either so comfortable or so independent as in a private house; a great consideration, by the by, where four ladies, three of them young and one an invalid, are concerned.

Still fashion, for the higher classes of people, wills it that they shall live at the principal hotels, and to them accordingly they proceed; though few of these illustrious remain the usual period of time necessary for a successful treatment by mineral waters.

This state of things has given immense importance to the hotel-keepers, and in that respect Harrogate is something like Baden-Baden. These gentry are, in good troth, the lords of the place at present. What does not suit them, that must not be; and in the pursuit of this object, each pulls his own way, and cares not what becomes of the rest. They go so far as to command (for it's a threat in the shape of a request) the closing of the hospital, as before stated, during the season, lest the sight of the poor lepers, and still more so, the use they make of the sulphur water out of the upper or bog-wells, as they are called, should interfere with their own establishment of baths and invalids.

The hotels are of two classes; but this division, which was a well-marked one a few years back, is now dwindled away, from the force and change of circumstances. At one time your opulent Leeds, and Sheffield, and Manchester factors, whose ideas of supreme happiness at a Spa were limited to a moderately dear hotel or boarding-house, no more dreamt of stopping at the gates of the Dragon, still less at those of the Granby, for admission, than they would at the palace of my Lord Harewood, by the way, for that purpose. No; they sneaked into the Swan, the White Hart, or the Wellington, or, as the summum bonum, into the Crown, to occupy some one of its hundred little bedrooms, low-roofed and without bells, arranged on each side of narrow corridors, which crossing each other at right angles, and in all directions, would puzzle the most expert topographer. The Dragon and the Granby were sacred places. The lords only graced the latter, while the wealthy commoner pleased himself in the former.

Now, nous aeons changé, etc. Pretty little gauche misses and their snuff-coloured coated papas boldly stalk into both houses without being "called ;" cutlers and cotton-spinners aspire to great assembly rooms and gigantic banqueting saloons; and nothing 'pleases the wealthy townsman of Bradford and Huddersfield, Halifax and Rochdale, but the lambris dorés, the well-stuffed sofas of red damask, and the cuisine par excellence of those two crack hotels.

The season, however, presently arrives, when the smoke of their native places recalls them to their duties, and when the complexion of the previously pimpled damsels being well polished by the sulphur bath, and the lining of their papa's stomach altered into a fresh manufacturing power by the Cheltenham chalybeate, - they must take their departure and leave London luxury at Harrogate for Lancashire and Yorkshire homeliness. And then the Right Honourables, the MPs, - the baronets, and their ladies, pour into Harrogate, chase away all the vulgar before them, fill the Dragon and the Granby with "Ha-ha-s," and "How do-s," imprisoning the real invalids at the Crown ; - where, by the by, I lived for a week very comfortably, to be near the Montpellier Spa and the Old Well.

Then begin the real gaieties of Harrogate, then the money flies, and six weeks of a plentiful harvest enables the respective landlords of those aristocratic establishments to keep them up during the lest of the year, with expenses and taxes upon them that would appal a chicken-hearted Boniface, and which could not be met but for the extravagant charges the landlords themselves make on their customers of "gentle blood."

The well-ascertained existence of four distinct classes of mineral waters at Harrogate, namely, the pure chalybeates, the saline chalybeates, the saline without any chalybeate, and lastly and principally, the sulphur water, will render it necessary for medical men, when they recommend the water of Harrogate to their patients, accurately to specify of which class the patient should partake.

Nor is this all. According to the analyses, the springs of the same class seem to differ among themselves. Thus we have the strongest sulphur at the Montpellier, the middle degree of strength in sulphur at the Old Well, and a minimum degree of strength of sulphur at the Knaresborough or the Starbeck well. These distinctions should be attended to in prescribing.

Judging from my own experience, and the effect the several wells have had on me, I should feel disposed to begin the full course of sulphur water-drinking, with the Knaresborough, and end with the Montpellier. For warm baths the strongest is perhaps the best to be used at once.

Hitherto the sulphur waters alone have been used for bathing purposes. But there is no reason why the saline chalybeates, especially those which have a less quantity of the muriate of soda, and are therefore less likely to irritate the skin, should not hereafter be employed for baths. On the contrary, there is every reason why they should be so; since amongst many hundred cases of invalids who visit this Spa, a large proportion of them cannot bear, and some do not require, the application of sulphur to the skin; whereas they would be benefited by, and' many positively require, a chalybeate bath.

Mr Richardson, with whom I visited a patient or two at Harrogate, and had long conversations touching the virtues of the sulphur waters, entertains a general sweeping view respecting them and their effect in disease, derived from long experience. In all sluggish constitutions inclined to glandular disease, in scrofulous tendency, in obstruction of the mesenteric glands; in all cases of biliary derangements, of light dyspepsia, in constipation; but above all in the squamous, defedating, slow-acting diseases of the skin, he has found great benefit from the sulphur water, accompanied by sulphur baths. On the other hand, if there be fever, great irritability of the nervous system, or of the skin; if the tongue be furred, or white and dry, - the skin parched, hot, and feverish; if there be any palpitation of the heart present, not symptomatic merely of indigestion but idiopathic; or if any degree of active inflammation of the lungs is going on, - the sulphur water will do mischief.

Where the sulphur water is suitable, it purges when taken in the quantity of a pint and a half in the morning. A smaller dose will hardly do it. Mr Richardson orders it to be drank in two tumblers of three-quarters of a pint each, with an interval of twenty minutes between; and he considers the course to last from three to six weeks; sometimes interrupting the course by a short excursion between. He seldom recommends more than twelve baths.

Mr. Richardson admits that where it does not purge, or in those cases in which it disagrees even when it purges, the sulphur water will affect the head, and produce confusion and distress. He has been in the habit of recommending often a little blue-pill or some aperient medicine to assist the water when the latter does not operate unless drank in large quantities; as in such cases he looks upon the harm that might arise from the mercury as a lesser evil, than what would inevitably be produced by the ingestion of a very large quantity of the water.

When after drinking the water for a period of two or three weeks he finds that the patients nauseate the dose, he invariably directs them to desist from it altogether. That the sulphureted water is an agent of great power, he is quite convinced, although Mr. Richardson (like myself in the case of the Spas in Germany), found most of his brother practitioners of eminence in the north of England sceptical, and inclined to laugh at his faith in the waters. "And yet," says he, "they will send me patients very often to be treated and cured by the very waters they seem to despise." "You have yourself noticed," continued Mr. Richardson, "the success operated on Mr -, of Newcastle. He was despatched hither by our common acquaintance and brother practitioner, Dr -, a leading man in that city, despairing of his recovery almost, and sceptical as to the power of our sulphureted waters. He will be much and agreeably surprised when he beholds him come back next week. At his arrival in Harrogate, I assure you I hardly knew whether I should mislead him with any hope of success from these waters, so ill was he; but we tried, and the conclusion is most gratifying."

I attach more importance to these general and practical remarks and precepts of a man of good sense and respectability, with that degree of professional acuteness which is sufficient to enable a medical man to turn to account his long experience in the treatment of diseases by means of the Harrogate waters, than I do to many a learned treatise based on presumed analogies, supposed philosophical inductions, or wirespun scientific theories.

With most of Mr. Richardson's views and ideas, my experience of some years in witnessing the effects of the Harrogate waters on several of my patients, coincides. But having had a much wider field of practice in the general application of mineral waters for the treatment of disease, than he can have had in the single locality of Harrogate, I differ somewhat from him in all that relates to the quantity of water to be taken, the manner of taking it, and the effects to be produced.

I differ first in point of quantity. A pint and a half of the strong sulphureted water is an exorbitant dose, because a pint of it contains 108 grains of common salt, and the whole dose 162 grains, being fully a third of an ounce of common or kitchen salt; by far too large a quantity of that stimulating condiment for any stomach.

Had there been in combination with it any sulphate of soda, or even of magnesia, to qualify the physiological effects of so large a proportion of sea-salt, and thus add to its solvent and purgative power, my objection would be considerably weakened, perhaps removed. But as the analysis shows no such saline ingredient to be present in the water, the objectionable properties of an excessive dose of sea-salt swallowed in the course of less than an hour and a half before breakfast, are left to act unmodified upon the coats of the stomach; and accordingly we find that people taking it, are liable to feel uncomfortable and heated about the pit of the stomach, and to experience a peculiar headache, under which I have myself suffered to a considerable degree from that cause.

This headache differs from every other species of headache, and is much more severe and alarming, in as much as it seems to occupy the centre and basis of the brain, and is accompanied by a sensation of distension in the blood-vessels, together with a feeling, that if you were to move the head quickly, one of the gorged blood-vessels must give way. This species of headache, however, is principally to be ascribed to the large quantity of sulphureted hydrogen gas, which in each prescribed dose of one half-pint of water, amounts to 60 per cent in the strongest well. An effect equally unsatisfactory, occasioned by the latter cause, may be noticed in respect to the abdominal secretions, which appear dry and burnt up, denoting clearly a feverish and irritated state of the mucous lining of the intestines.

As to the mode of administering the water, I must object, with all those who are well versed in the practice of a mineral water treatment, to its being drunk, at one time, in such a quantity as I find it recommended in this country. The Harrogate water, like many other mineral waters endowed with energetic properties, is an agent of mischief when inconsiderately prescribed. To order more as a dose than the stomach can digest in the course of twenty minutes, is to inflict injury on the patient; and the Germans, who limit the quantity of each draught of their waters to four ounces, with an interval of twenty minutes between, act wisely and from good experience.

I also think that the first dose of the fetid water should be taken diluted with hot water of the ordinary sort, and the rest warmed by a mixture of the same water previously heated. Rather than rely on quantity for the aperient effect of this water, I would add to it, according to each individual case, that which it lacks, namely a small proportion of Glauber salts in the first glass.

It is the same with respect to bathing in the Harrogate water. I have found the baths too stimulating when the water has been used undiluted; and in proportion as the stimulation has been great, so has the reaction been after it, when the blood seems to flee from the surface, to congregate in the centre, and to produce, at one and the same time, a great sensation of heat internally, and thirst; while the surface, particularly of the face and extremities, is miserably chilly, and almost blue.

A young lady, a patient of mine, using the baths by my direction at Harrogate, had found them to produce the two distinct effects just mentioned, up to the time of my arrival; whereas by explaining to her the cause, and avoiding it by proper dilution, as well as by exciting a gentle glow immediately after coming out of the bath, through the usual means, I soon released her from all unpleasant effects.

Mr. Richardson, on being questioned on the subject, assured me that the sulphur waters are excellent in verminous disorders; and that gout, or a tendency to it, is often effectually checked by the same means, as well as rheumatism, in its various chronic forms, and not otherwise.

Against complaints like these, however, and for inveterate and the most difficult cases of cutaneous disease, Harrogate possesses, in my opinion, a much more powerful agent, which has hitherto entirely escaped the attention of the profession, and to which I desire most emphatically to direct it-namely, the mud-baths.

The material well calculated for that purpose is near at hand. Upon a high ground, a short distance from Low Harrogate, in a westerly direction, is a piece of moss or bog earth, which has commonly but erroneously been supposed to be "the mother of the Harrogate waters." The whole surface there, to a considerable extent, presents an extraordinary phenomenon in the physical history of the place. Deep sulphur wells, two or three pools of water impregnated with tannin and more than one saline chalybeate, as I ascertained on the spot by tests, dot an area of some acres, which altogether has the appearance of a great chemical laboratory of nature. Cuttings in the quaking surface at various distances, and natural denudations, have discovered the character of bog-earth, with its redundancy of free sulphuric acid.

On the margin of this curious district, a Hospital for both male and female patients requiring the use of the Harrogate waters has been erected, through the exertions of Mr Richardson and a few benevolent individuals, aided by the liberality of the Earl of Harewood, lord of the manor, who has secured to the miserable objects requiring such a boon, in the best manner that his tenure would allow, the possession of the grant of the land he made to them, and on which the hospital stands.

"I have, on my part, done my best," said his lordship at the foundation of the hospital, "(next to alienating altogether the land-which I cannot do,) to make it a permanent possession to the poor; and I hope I may answer for the benevolence and philanthropy of my descendants."

The establishment is small, but useful, and has done much good. It is well managed; but during the season it is kept closed, by reasons to which I have alluded, and which are not creditable to the parties who impose such a condition. The patients' supply themselves with the necessary sulphur water from the springs of the bog tract close at hand, which springs being open also to all the inhabitants, supply many of them and their baths with water, fetched away in appropriate vessels.

Well then, it is this very tract of land which should supply the material for the mud-baths ; and an intelligent, enterprising person, acting under the direction of an able physician well versed in the theory and practice of mud-baths, as now greatly and most successfully used in Germany, would confer great benefit to society, and secure immense advantage to himself, by the establishment at Harrogate of sulphureted mud-baths, like those of St Amand in the department of the North in France.

If the pedestrian from this current tract of land, extends his excursion further westerly, about two miles and a half, either along the high-road, or across. an extensive boggy moor (which I nearly had reason to repent I had ever attempted), he will

reach the foot of a lofty tower, standing isolated, like a great beacon, rising one hundred feet, upon an extensive waste. To the interior of this lie will - he admitted through a curiously wrought-iron gate, which marks the number of visitors as they are admitted, - and so ascend to the top; where by the help of twelve telescopes, there placed in the direction of radii to a circle, he will sweep every part of the horizon, but will look in vain for the two seas-the German and the Irish-the expectation of beholding which originally induced Mr Thomson to erect this "Observatory."

As proprietor of it, that gentleman has turned the building to account, making at least ten per cent for his money, which he has taken good care to protect against any possible desire of appropriation on the part of the keeper (an odd character), by the contrivance before alluded to.

One improvement Mr. Thomson might adopt at the summit of his observatory - one adopted at the Belvidere of Neufchatel, in Switzerland, where glasses are placed to survey an extensive horizon of Alpine country-and which consists in having the names of the remarkable places to which the glasses are directed, and their distances, engraved on a brass plate fixed to the parapet beneath the glass.

I will conclude what I have to say on the subject of the treatment of disease by the Harrogate waters, by stating that during the last season, patients afflicted with hepatic disorders, glandular affection, rheumatism dependent on sluggish secretions, frequent eruption of boils and other disorders, whom I had recommended to proceed to Harrogate, returned thence completely restored.

While speaking of the treatment of diseases by the mineral waters of Harrogate, our mind is naturally directed to the consideration of its climate and territorial aspect. Nothing can be purer than the air at Harrogate. Its elasticity is felt by every new visitor immediately on his arrival; but the situation is exposed to high winds, and the temperature is generally low - lower by two degrees than in the town of Knaresborough, placed in a lower part of the valley.

Judging from my own experience and the affirmation of the oldest inhabitant, or assiduous frequenters of the Spa, it rains, on an average, four days in the week during the summer months; and it is seldom that the sky is perfectly free from lowering clouds or gloom. But as the soil is of that light porous limestone, which absorbs all moisture with great rapidity, the rain sinks speedily into the earth; and a few minutes after the heaviest shower, one can walk out on the paths and in the streets without inconvenience.

This very quality of the soil is averse to the success of agriculture. There is generally a character of poverty about the land of the immediately surrounding districts, and there is no large timber. Green crops are the principal occupants of the land, and these do not seem to be farmed so well as in Northumberland and other northern counties. The characteristics of prosperity are not visible around Harrogate; and there is an appearance of dilapidation, more or less marked, even in the hedges and gates that divide the fields.

As to the native inhabitants of this particular district of Yorkshire, whether of the industrious or of the consuming classes, they are not, as in many other parts of that county, particularly well favoured by nature. It is seldom that one meets with a handsome adult woman, or a very good-looking man. This is not the district for tall life-guardsmen ; yet in children the character of their physiognomy is pleasing.

I have dwelt more largely, perhaps, than is consistent with the nature of the present work, on the Spas of Harrogate. But among the few really important Spas of which England can boast, in comparison to other countries, I hold Harrogate to be of such manifest superiority-indeed, I was almost going to say, uniqueness-on account of the peculiar nature of its waters (if properly managed), its sulphur mud, now first recommended, and its situation, that I felt anxious to bring all its merits before the general readers more fully than any medical treatise had done before. It is for this reason that I have entered into details which the medical treatises I allude to could not embrace, but which, to a non-medical reader, are of paramount interest.

Harrogate has the elements within itself of becoming a Spa of the first magnitude, even to the extent of attracting foreign travellers ; but there is much to be done to bring it to that state. At present the condition of Harrogate is quite primitive, and as such, liable to all those impediments to progress which appertain to the petits pays. Hence one hears without surprise of the bickerings, piques, and feuds, between Low and High Harrogate. They of the latter envy those of Lower Harrogate their springs and Well, at the same time that they boast of their superb hotels and large establishments. But these are sneered at by the Low Harrogate people, who, in their turn, point to their noble pump-room, and promenades, their Crown, and their Swan.

In Harrogate no vestige of any form of government obtrudes itself on the notice of the stranger ; and not a single representative of the smallest civic authority is to be found here, not even a guardian of the night, or a day-policeman. Hence encroachments on public privileges and rights not infrequently are attempted ; and, but for the watchfulness of the threatened victim, would be carried into effect. Thus, last year, in order to annoy the low Harrogatians, a determination was expressed by somebody to cut down a tolerably fine row of beech-trees, which, at this moment, form the only shaded walk for visitors who are returning from the baths at Low Harrogate in very hot weather. The thing would have been done, though the timber could not have fetched at a sale more than a few hundred pence, and though it grows on crown land; when a spirited remonstrance from the Low Harrogate people to the board, stopped the intended act of vandalism.

If true public spirit existed between the two places, Harrogate would soon rise in the scale of Spas. At present, I fear, from all I have gathered from the very best authority, such is far from being the case. Nay, it has been remarked, that if the dwellers of Low Harrogate project any improvement for the general good, in order to increase the attraction of the place, those of High Harrogate will not join to defray the expenses.

With the exception of one or two individuals with whom I conversed on the subject, and who are connected with the bathing establishments, I have found very little disposition in the proprietors of the springs, or the permanent inhabitants, to effect any thing to promote the advancement of the place, or to make known the value of its water, together with the gradual though slow ameliorations that are taking place from year to year. They are all apathetic, and prefer to leave things to take their course.

I hope they may be roused by what I have here stated, and by the very favourable opinion I have given of the Spa in general, to a more enterprising conduct. A spirited capitalist would find an unexplored mine of wealth in Harrogate; which is not one of your ephemeral Spas, dependent on fashion. Its almost peculiar waters are lasting, and so must and will be their reputation.