The tepidarium, as the name would imply, was a room in which a moderately warm bath could be taken and where the process of dry rubbing also took place. In the balneum a hot bath could be taken, originally in a tub, but in later times in a large reservoir; and in the frigidarium a cold plunge could be had. The elæothesium was the anointing room where the body was rubbed with oil and massaged.
A good idea of the general layout of a Roman bath can be gained from the accompanying woodcut, showing the ground floor plan of the baths of Pompeii. The baths, as may be seen by the illustration, are nearly surrounded on three sides by houses and shops. The whole building, which comprises a double set of baths, has six different entrances from the street, one of which, A, gives admission to the smaller set only, which was appropriated to the women, and five others to the male department, of which two, B and C, communicate directly with the furnaces, and the other three, D, E, F, with the bathing apartments, of which F, the nearest to the Forum, was the principal one; the other two, D and E, being on opposite sides of the building served for the convenience of those who lived on the north and east sides of the city. To have a variety of entrances was one of the qualities considered necessary to a well constructed set of baths.
Passing through the principal entrance, F, which is removed from the street by a narrow footway, and after descending three steps, the bather finds upon his left hand a small chamber or toilet room, 1, which contains a latrine. From passage, F, he proceeded to covered portico, 2, which ran around three sides of an open court, 3, and this portico and court together formed the vestibule of the baths, in which servants belonging to the establishment, as well as such of the slaves and attendants of the great and wealthy, whose services were not required in the interior, waited. Within the court the keeper of the baths who exacted the fee paid by each visitor, was also stationed, and accordingly in it was found the box for holding the money. The room, 4, which runs back from the portico, might have been apportioned to him, or if not, it might have been a waiting room for the convenience of the better classes while waiting the return of their acquaintances from the interior. In this court, likewise, as being the most public place, advertisements for the theater and other announcements of general interest were posted, one of which, announcing a gladiatorial show, still remains. The passageway, 5, is the corridor which leads from the entrance, E, to the vestibule; and the cell, 6, is a toilet room similar to 1. Number 7 is a passage of communication which leads into the chamber, 8, which served as a room for undressing. This room is also accessible from the street by the door, D, through the corridor, 9, in which a small niche is observable, which probably served for the station of another doorkeeper, who collected money from those entering from the north street. Here, then, is the center in which all the persons must have met before entering into the interior of the baths; and its locality, as well as other characteristic features of its fitting up, leave no room to doubt that it served as an undressing room. It does not appear that any general rule of construction was followed by the architects of antiquity with regard to the locality and temperature best adapted for a dressing room. The bathers were expected to take off their garments in the dressing room, not being permitted to enter the interior unless naked. The clothes were then delivered to a class of slaves whose duty it was to take charge of them. These men were notorious for dishonesty, and leagued with all the thieves of the city, so that they connived at the robberies they were placed there to prevent. To so great an extent were these robberies carried, that very severe laws were finally enacted making the crime of stealing from a bath a capital offence.
To return to the chamber itself, it is vaulted and spacious, with stone seats along two sides of the wall and a step for the feet below, slightly raised from the floor. Holes can still be seen in the walls which might have served for pegs on which the garments were hung when taken off; for in a small provincial town like Pompeii, where a robbery committed in the bath could scarcely escape detection, there would be no necessity for slaves to take charge of them. The dressing room was lighted by a window closed with glass, and the walls and ceilings were ornamented with stucco mouldings and painted yellow. There are no less than six doors to this chamber: one leading to the entrance, E, another to the entrance, D, a third to the small room, 11, a fourth to the furnaces, a fifth to the tepid apartment, and the sixth opened upon the cold baths, 10. The bath, which is coated with white marble, is 12 feet 10 inches in diameter, about 3 feet deep and has two marble steps to facilitate the descent into it, and a seat surrounding it at a depth of 10 inches from the bottom, for the purpose of enabling the bathers to sit down and wash themselves. It is probable that many persons contented themselves with cold baths only, instead of going through the severe course of perspiration in the warm apartments; and as the frigidarium could have had no effect alone in baths like these, the natatio must be referred to when it is said that at one period cold baths were in such request that scarcely any others were used.
There is a platform or ambulatory around the bath, also of marble, and four inches of the same material disposed at regular intervals around the walls, with pedestals for statues probably placed in them. The ceiling is vaulted and the chamber lighted by a window in the center. The annexed woodcut represents a frigidarium with its cold bath at one extremity, supposed to have formed a part of the Formian Villa of Cicero, to whose age the style of construction, the use of the simple Doric order, undoubtedly belongs. The bath itself, into which water still continues to flow from a neighboring spring, is placed under the alcove, and the two doors on each side opened into small chambers.
In the cold bath of Pompeii the water ran into the basin through a spout of bronze and was carried off again through a conduit on the opposite side. It was also furnished with a waste pipe under the coping to prevent the water from running over.
No. 11 is a small chamber on the side opposite to the frigidarium, which might have served for shaving or for keeping unguents or strigils; and from the centers of the side of the frigidarium, the bather who intended to go through the process of warm bathing and sudation entered into 12, the tepidarium.
The tepidarium did not contain water, either at Pompeii or at the baths of Hippias, but was merely heated with warm air of an agreeable temperature, in order to prepare the body for the great heat of the vapor and warm baths; and, upon returning, to obviate the danger of too sudden transition to the open air.
In the baths of Pompeii, this chamber served likewise as a disrobing room for those who took the warm bath, for which purpose the fittings up are evidently adapted, the walls being divided into a number of separate compartments or recesses for receiving the garments when taken off. One of these compartments, known as an Atlantes, is shown in the annexed woodcut.
In addition to this service there can be little doubt that this apartment was used as a depository for unguents and a room for anointing, which service was performed by slaves. For the purpose of anointing, the common people used oil simply or sometimes scented, but the more wealthy classes indulged in the greatest extravagances with regard to their perfumes and unguents. These they evidently procured from the elæothesium of the baths, or brought with them in small glass bottles, hundreds of which have been discovered in different excavations made in various parts of Italy.
From the tepidarium, a door which closed by its own weight, to prevent the admission of cold air, opened into No. 13, the thermal chamber. After having gone through the regular course of perspiration, the Romans made use of instruments called strigils, to scrape off the perspiration, much in the same way as we are accustomed to scrape the sweat off a horse with a piece of iron hoop after he has run a heat or come in from violent exercise. These instruments, many of which have been discovered among the ruins of the various baths of antiquity, were made of bone, bronze, iron and silver. The poorer classes were obliged to scrape themselves, but the more wealthy took their slaves to the baths for the purpose, a fact which is elucidated by a curious story related by Spartianus. The Emperor while bathing one day, observing an old soldier, whom he had formerly known among the legions, rubbing his back as the cattle do against the marble walls of the chamber, asked him why he converted the walls into a strigil, and learning that he was too poor to keep a slave he gave him one, and money for his maintenance. On the following day, upon his return to the bath, he found a whole row of old men rubbing themselves in the same manner against the wall, in the hope of experiencing the same good fortune from the prince's liberality; but instead of taking the hint, he had them all called up and told them to scrub one another.
The strigil was by no means a blunt instrument, consequently its edge was softened by the application of oil which was dropped on it from a small vessel. This vessel had a narrow neck, so as to discharge its contents drop by drop. Augustus is related to have suffered from an over violent use of this instrument. Invalids and persons of delicate habit made use of sponges, which Pliny says answered for towels as well as strigils. They were finally dried with towels and anointed.
The common people were supplied with these necessaries in the baths, but the more wealthy carried their own with them.
After the operation of scraping and rubbing dry, they retired into or remained in the tepidarium until they thought it prudent to encounter the open air. But it does not appear to have been customary to bathe in the water, when there was any, which was not the case at Pompeii nor at the Baths of Hippias, either of the tepidarium or frigidarium; the temperature only of the atmosphere in the two chambers being of consequence to break the sudden change from the extreme hot to cold. Returning now to the frigidarium, 8, which according to the directions of Vitruvius has a passage, 14, communicating with the mouth of the furnace, e, and passing down that passage we reach the chamber, 15, into which the præfurnium projects, and which has also an entrance from the street, B, appropriated to those who had charge of the fires. There are two stairways in it, one leading to the roof of the baths, and the other to the coppers which contained the water. Of these there were three, one of which contained the hot water, caldarium; the second, the tepid, tepidarium; and the last, the cold, frigidarium. The warm water was introduced into the warm bath by means of a conduit pipe, marked on the plan, and conducted through the wall. Underneath the caldarium was placed the furnace which served to heat the water and give out streams of warm air into the hollow cells of the hypocanstum. These coppers were constructed in the same manner as is represented in the engraving from the Thermæ of Titus; the one containing hot water being placed immediately over the furnace, and as the water was drawn out from these it was supplied from the next, the tepidarium, which was already considerably heated, from its contiguity to the furnace and the hypocaust below it, so that it supplied the deficiency of the former without materially diminishing its temperature; and the space in the last two was in turn filled up from the farthest removed, which contained the cold water received direct from the square reservoir behind them. Behind the coppers there is another corridor, 16, leading into the court, 17, appropriated to the servants of the baths, and which has also the conveniences of an immediate communication with the street by the door, C.
We now proceed to the adjoining set of baths, which were assigned to the women. The entrance is by the door, A, which conducts into a small vestibule, 18, thence into the apodyterium, 19, which, like the one in the men's baths, has a seat on either side built up against the wall. This room opens upon a cold bath, 20, answering to the natiatio of the other set, but of much smaller dimensions. There are four steps on the inside to descend into it. Opposite to the door of entrance there is another doorway which leads to the tepidarium, 21, which also communicates with the thermal chamber, 22, on one side of which is a warm bath in a square recess. The floor of this chamber is suspended and its walls perforated for flues, like the corresponding one in the men's baths.
The comparative smallness and inferiority of the fittings up in this suit of baths has induced some Italian antiquaries to throw a doubt upon the fact of their being assigned to women, and ingeniously suggest that they were a set of old baths, to which the larger ones were subsequently added when they became too small for the increasing wealth and population of the city. But the story already quoted of the consul's wife who turned the men out of their bath at Teanum for her convenience, seems sufficiently to negative such a supposition and to prove that the inhabitants of ancient Italy, if not more selfish, were certainly less gallant than their successors. In addition to this, Vitruvius expressly enjoins that the baths of the men and women, though separate, should be contiguous to each other, in order that they might be supplied from the same boilers and hypocaust; directions that are here fulfilled to the letter, as a glance at the plans will demonstrate.
Notwithstanding the ample account which has been given of the plans and usages respecting baths in general, something yet remains to be said about that particular class denominated thermæ, of which establishment the baths, in fact, constituted the smallest part. The thermæ, properly speaking, were a Roman adaptation of the Greek gymnasium. The thermæ contained a system of baths in conjunction with conveniences for athletic games and youthful sports, places in which rhetoricians declaimed, poets recited and philosophers lectured, as well as porticos and vestibules for the idle, and libraries for the studious. They were decorated with the finest objects of art, both in painting and sculpture, covered with precious marbles and adorned with fountains and shaded walks. It may be said that they began and ended with the Empire, for it was not until the time of Augustus that these magnificent structures were commenced. M. Agrippa was the first who afforded these luxuries to his countrymen by bequeathing to them the thermæ and gardens which he had erected in the Campus Martius. The Pantheon, now existing at Rome, served originally as a vestibule to these baths; and, as it was considered too magnificent for the purpose, it is supposed that Agrippa added the portico and consecrated it as a temple, for which use it still serves.
The example set by Agrippa was followed by Nero and afterward by Titus, the ruins of whose thermæ are still visible, covering a vast extent, partly under ground and partly above the Esquiline Hill.
Previous to the erection of these establishments for the use of the population, it was customary, for those who sought the favor of the people, to give them a day's bathing free of expense.
Thus, according to Divi Cassius, Faustus, the son of Sulla, furnished warm baths and oil gratis to the people for one day; and Augustus, on one occasion, furnished warm baths and barbers to the people for the same period free of expense, and at another time for a whole year to the women as well as the men. From thence it is fair to infer that the quadrant paid for admission to the balnea was not exacted at the thermæ, which as being the works of the emperors, would naturally be opened with imperial generosity to all, and without any charge, otherwise the whole city would have thronged to the establishment bequeathed to them by Agrippa; and in confirmation of this opinion it might be remarked that the old establishments, which were probably erected by private enterprises, were termed Meritorial.
Most, if not all, of the other regulations previously detailed as relating to the economy of the baths, apply equally to the thermæ; but it is in these establishments especially that the dissolute conduct of the emperors and other luxurious indulgence of the people in general, as detailed in the compositions of the satirists and later writers, must be considered to refer.
Although considerable remains of the Roman thermæ are still visible, yet, from the very ruinous state in which they are found, we are far from being able to arrive at the same accurate knowledge of their component parts and the usages to which they were applied, as has been done with respect to the balnea; or, indeed, to discover a satisfactory mode of reconciling their constructive details with the description left us by Vitruvious and Lucian. All, indeed, is doubt and guesswork. Each of the learned men who have pretended to give an account of their contents differing in all the essential particulars from one another; and yet the general similarity of the ground plan of the three which still remain cannot fail to strike even a superficial observer; so great indeed that it is impossible not to perceive at once that they were all constructed upon a similar plan. Not, however, to discuss the subject without enabling the reader to form something like a general idea of these enormous edifices, which from their extent and magnificence have been likened to provinces, a ground plan of the thermæ of Caracalla is annexed, which are the best preserved among those remaining, and which were perhaps more splendid than all the rest. Those apartments of which the use is ascertained with the appearances of probability, will be alone marked and explained. The dark parts represent the remains still visible; the open lines are restorations.
A is a portico fronting the street made by Caracalla when he constructed his thermæ. B are separate bathing-rooms, either for the use of the common people, or perhaps for any person who did not wish to bathe in public. C are apodyteria attached to them. D, D and E, E, the porticos. F, F, exedra in which there were seats for the philosophers to hold their conversations. G, passages open to the air. H, H, sladra. I, I, possibly schools or academies where public lectures were delivered. J, J and K, K, rooms appropriated to the servants of the bath. In the latter are staircases for ascending to the principal reservoir. L, space occupied by walks and shrubberies. M, the arena or stadium in which the youth performed their exercises, with seats for spectators. N, N, reservoirs with upper stories; O, aqueduct which supplied the baths. P, cistern.
This external range of buildings occupies one mile in circuit.
We now come to the arrangement of the interior, for which it is very difficult to assign satisfactory destinations. Q represents the principal entrances, of which there were eight. R is the natiatio or cold water baths to which the direct entrance from the portico is by a vestibule on either side marked S, and which is surrounded by a set of chambers that serve most probably as rooms for undressing and anointing.
Those nearest to the peristyle were, perhaps, where the powder was kept which the wrestlers used in order to obtain a firmer grip upon their adversaries.
The inferior quality of the ornaments which these apartments had, and the staircases in two of them, afford evidences that they were occupied by menials. T is considered to be the tepidarium with four warm baths taken out of its four angles, and two labra on its two flanks. There are steps for descending into the baths, in one of which traces of the conduit are still manifest. It would appear that the center part of this apartment served as a tepidarium, having a cold water lavatory in four of its corners. The center part, like that also of the preceding apartment, is supported by eight immense columns.
The apartments beyond this, which are too much dilapidated to be restored with any degree of certainty, contained, of course, the laconium and sudatories, for which the round chamber, W, and its appurtenances seem to be adapted, and which are also contiguous to the reservoirs, Z, Z. The apartments e, e' are probably places where youths were taught their exercises, with the appurtenances belonging to them. The chambers on the other side, which are not marked, probably served for the exercises in bad weather. These baths contained an upper story, of which nothing remains beyond what is just sufficient to indicate the fact. It will be observed that there is no part of the bathing department separate from the rest which could be assigned to the use of women exclusively. From this it must be inferred either that both sexes always bathed together promiscuously in the thermæ, or that the women were excluded altogether from these establishments.
It remains to explain the manner in which the immense body of water required for the supply of a set of baths in the thermæ was heated. This has been done very satisfactorily by Piranesi and Cameron, as may be seen by a reference to the two sectional elevations showing the reservoir and aqueducts belonging to the Thermæ of Caracalla. A are arches of the aqueduct which conveyed the water into the reservoir, B, whence it flowed into the upper range of cells through the aperture at C, and thence again descended into the lower ones by the aperture, D, which were placed immediately over the hypocaust, E, the furnace of which can be seen in the transverse section at F. There were thirty-two of these cells arranged in two rows over the hypocaust, sixteen on each side, and all communicating with one another, and over these a similar number similarly arranged, which communicated with those below by the aperture at D. The parting walls between these cells were likewise perforated with flues which served to disseminate the heat all around the whole body of water. When the water was sufficiently warm it was turned on to the baths through pipes conducted likewise through flues in order to prevent the loss of temperature during passage, and the lower reservoir was supplied as fast as water was drawn off from the reservoir next above, which in turn was supplied with water from the topmost tier and the aqueduct.
Perhaps a better idea of the thermæ can be had by an examination of the plan of the Thermæ of Titus, Rome, restored by Leclerc, also the sectional elevation and front elevation of the same bath, restored by the same artist. The original drawings, which won the Grand Prix de Rome, are preserved in the library of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Paris. A restoration by Viollet-le-Duc, which appeared with the other restorations in the June, 1906, number of the Architectural Record, conveys a very good idea of the interior of a frigidarium.
CHAPTER V
Synopsis of Chapter. Fall of the Roman Empire—Succeeding Period known as the Dark Ages—Sanitation during the Dark Ages—Beginning of Material Progress in Sanitation—Pilgrimages to Juggernaut—Water Supply to Paris—London Water Supply—Aqueduct of Zempoala, Mexico.
During the period following the fall of Rome, the empire was overrun by barbarians from the north, and the magnificent baths, aqueducts and public edifices reared by the Romans with such painstaking care were suffered to fall into decay. So little in sympathy were the barbarians with the people they conquered and their institutions, that in time the inhabitants of many localities even forgot the uses to which the old works had been put; and had it not been for the Popes the supply of water to the city of Rome would have been cut off completely, while as it was the service was frequently interrupted.
Following the fall of the Roman Empire there was a period of over one thousand years of intellectual darkness, during which no material progress was made; indeed, instead of progress a retrograde movement set in which left a lasting impression on the times. The little spark of knowledge that survived this period burned in the monasteries of the monks, who treasured and kept alive the spark of civilization.
The Dark Ages, as this period is called, if lacking in progress, were replete with adventure. During this period, which might equally well be called the Age of Romance, there sprung up a brotherhood of men noted for skill in combat, who were dubbed knights. There also spread a creed about that time that uncleanliness was next to godliness, and clergy and laymen vied with each other to see which could live in the most filthy manner. They associated in their minds luxury and cleanliness as inconsistent with godliness, while squalor and bodily filth were considered as outward indications of inward piety and sanctification. So it came to pass that bathing, instead of a daily practice, became uncommon; homes and inhabitants became filthy and streams polluted. Such violations of sanitary principles could not continue indefinitely without evil results, and scourge after scourge of filth diseases that swept over Europe and Asia, claiming over 40,000,000 victims, were due to the unsanitary condition that prevailed. The restless, seething, venturesome spirit of the times and the emotional zeal displayed in religious matters contributed greatly to the spread of pestilence. The crusades, starting out with a romantic and religious fervor, but with no set rules of conduct for guidance, and lacking a leader strong enough in discipline to hold in check men whose only claim to distinction lay in their powers in a tilt and their love of battle, soon degenerated into the most disorderly and lewd of rabble. Women camp-followers joined their fortunes with that of the knights, who in most cases forgot the object of the crusade, and gave themselves up to indolence and debauchery. Sanitary precautions were dispensed with on the march, and the result was that wherever the crusaders went they left sickness and pestilence in their wake.
Pilgrimages to the holy shrines, which drew together thousands of human beings without adequate shelter or food, also served to spread contagious diseases throughout the land. Perhaps the best picture of a pilgrimage which, while of a latter date, will still serve to show the unsanitary conditions when thousands of people are brought together without food or shelter, can be had from a report of Dr. Simmons, of the Yokahama Board of Health. In speaking of a latter-day pilgrimage in India, he says: "The drinking-water supply is derived from wells, so-called 'tanks' or artificial ponds and the water courses of the country. The wells generally resemble those of other parts of Asia. The tanks are excavations made for the purpose of collecting the surface water during the rainy season and storing it up for the dry. Necessarily they are mere stagnant pools. The water is used not only to quench thirst, but is said to be drunk as a sacred duty. At the same time, the reservoir serves as a large washing tub for clothes, no matter how dirty or in what soiled condition, and for personal bathing. Many of the watercourses are sacred; notably the Ganges, a river 1,600 miles long, in whose waters it is the religious duty of millions, not only those living near its banks, but for pilgrims, to bathe and to cast their dead. The Hindoo cannot be made to use a latrine. In the cities he digs a hole in his habitation; in the country he seeks the fields, the hillside, the banks of streams and rivers when obliged to obey the calls of nature. Hence it is that the vicinity of towns and the banks of the tanks and water courses are reeking with filth of the worst description, which is of necessity washed into the public water supply with every rainfall. Add to this the misery of pilgrims, then poverty and disease and the terrible crowding into the numerous towns which contain some temple or shrine, the object of their devotion, and we can see how India has become and remains the hotbed of the cholera epidemic." In the United States official report the horrors incident upon the pilgrimages are detailed with appalling minuteness. W. W. Hunter, in his "Orissa," states that twenty-four high festivals take place annually at Juggernaut. At one of them, about Easter, 40,000 persons indulge in hemp and hasheesh to a shocking degree. For weeks before the car festival, in June and July, pilgrims come trooping in by thousands every day. They are fed by the temple cooks to the number of 90,000. Over 100,000 men and women, many of them unaccustomed to work or exposure, tug and strain at the car until they drop exhausted and block the road with their bodies. During every month of the year a stream of devotees flows along the great Orissa road from Calcutta, and every village for three hundred miles has its pilgrim encampments.
The people travel in small bands, which at the time of the great feasts actually touch each other. Five-sixths of the whole are females and ninety-five per cent. travel on foot, many of them marching hundreds and even thousands of miles, a contingent having been drummed up from every town or village in India by one or other of the three thousand emissaries of the temple, who scour the country in all directions in search of dupes. When those pilgrims who have not died on the road arrive at their journey's end, emaciated, with feet bound up in rags and plastered with mud and dirt, they rush into the sacred tanks or the sea and emerge to dress in clean garments. Disease and death make havoc with them during their stay; corpses are buried in holes scooped in the sand, and the hillocks are covered with bones and skulls washed from their shallow graves by the tropical rains. The temple kitchen has the monopoly of cooking for the multitude, and provides food which if fresh is not unwholesome. Unhappily, it is presented before Juggernaut, so becomes too sacred for the minutest portion to be thrown away. Under the influence of the heat it soon undergoes putrefactive fermentation, and in forty-eight hours much of it is a loathsome mass, unfit for human food. Yet it forms the chief sustenance of the pilgrims, and is the sole nourishment of thousands of beggars. Some one eats it to the very last grain. Injurious to the robust, it is deadly to the weak and wayworn, at least half of whom reach the place suffering under some form of bowel complaint. Badly as they are fed the poor wretches are worse lodged. Those who have the temporary shelter of four walls are housed in hovels built upon mud platforms about four feet high, in the center of each of which is the hole which receives the ordure of the household, and around which the inmates eat and sleep. The platforms are covered with small cells without any windows or other apertures for ventilation, and in these caves the pilgrims are packed, in a country where, during seven months out of twelve, the thermometer marks from 85 to 100 degrees Fahr. Hunter says that the scenes of agony and suffocation enacted in these hideous dens baffle description. In some of the best of them, 13 feet long by 10 feet broad and 6½, feet high, as many as eighty persons pass the night. It is not then surprising to learn that the stench is overpowering and the heat like that of an oven. Of 300,000 who visit Juggernaut in one season, 90,000 are often packed together five days a week in 5,000 of these lodgings. In certain seasons, however, the devotees can and do sleep in the open air, camping out in regiments and battalions, covered only with the same meagre cotton garment that clothes them by day. The heavy dews are unhealthy enough, but the great festival falls at the beginning of the rains, when the water tumbles in solid sheets. Then lanes and alleys are converted into torrents or stinking canals, and the pilgrims are driven into vile tenements. Cholera invariably breaks out. Living and dead are huddled together.
In the numerous so-called corpse fields around the town as many as forty or fifty corpses are seen at a time, and vultures sit and dogs lounge lazily about gorged with human flesh. In fact, there is no end to the recurrence of incidents of misery and humiliation, the horrors of which, says the Bishop of Calcutta, are unutterable, but which are eclipsed by those of the return journey. Plundered and fleeced by landlords, the surviving victims reel homeward staggering under their burden of putrid food wrapped up in dirty clothes, or packed in heavy baskets or earthenware jars. Every stream is flooded, and the travelers have often to sit for days in the rain on the banks of a river before a boat will venture to cross. At all these points the corpses lie thickly strewn around (an English traveler counted forty close to one ferry), which accounts for the prevalence of cholera on the banks of brooks, streams and rivers. Some poor creatures drop and die by the way; others crowd into the villages and halting places on the way, where those who gain admittance cram the lodging-places to overflowing, and thousands pass the night in the streets, and find no cover from the drenching storms. Groups are huddled under the trees; long lines are stretched among the carts and bullocks on the roadside, then half saturated with the mud on which they lie, hundreds sit on the wet grass, not daring to lie down, and rock themselves to a monotonous chant through the long hours of the dreary night. It is impossible to compute the slaughter of this one pilgrimage. Bishop Wilson estimates it at not less than 50,000, and this description might be used for all the great India pilgrimages, of which there are probably a dozen annually, to say nothing of the hundreds of smaller shrines scattered through the peninsula, each of which attracts its minor horde of credulous votaries.
Such then may be accepted as a picture of one of the numerous pilgrimages made during the Dark Ages and which helped to spread infectious diseases broadcast throughout the land, polluting water supplies to such an extent that in many localities filth diseases became epidemic. It was not until about the end of the sixteenth century that general improvement began to be made in sanitary matters, although some notable exceptions may be mentioned in the construction of a few important works in Spain by the Moors, such for instance as those at Cordova in the ninth century and the repair of the Roman aqueduct at Sevilla in 1172. Until as late a date as 1183 Paris depended entirely on the River Seine for its water supply. During that year an aqueduct was constructed to conduct water to Paris from a distant source, but as late as the year 1550 the supply of water to Paris amounted to only one quart per capita per day.
London, England, was more backward than Paris in supplying the inhabitants with water, and it was not until the year 1235 that small quantities of spring water were brought to the city through lead pipes and masonry conduits.
Little is known about the strange race of people that inhabited the North American continent prior to the Indians, and it is only by the ruins of works which they constructed in the shape of mounds that their existence is known of. Nevertheless, had historians of that time written of the engineering projects successfully carried out by the engineers of the mound builders no doubt some surprising facts would be revealed to contemporary man; for wherever men have existed, whether in China, Japan, Egypt, Europe, England or, as we are informed by astronomers, on Mars, gigantic works of irrigation have been successfully undertaken, and in most of the places mentioned conduits or aqueducts to supply water to inhabitants of communities were constructed. Reasoning then by analogy it would be safe to infer that before the race of mound builders became extinct they built works of equal importance if not of equal endurance. This belief is borne out by the fact that long before Columbus discovered America, the Aztecs of Mexico built an aqueduct to supply the ancient city, built on the site of the present City of Mexico. How long the aqueduct supplied the city before Cortez, in his expedition to conquer Mexico, destroyed the works, in 1521, nobody knows and the truth will probably never be told. The fact of the existence of such a structure is interesting chiefly as showing that in the matter of supplying communities with water the ancient tribes of Mexico and America had made considerable progress long before Europeans set foot on shore. It was in Mexico, too, that the next aqueduct in point of time was constructed. This work was built during the period between the years 1553 and 1570, under the supervision of Friar Francisco Tembleque, a Franciscan monk, and served for about two centuries to carry water from the mountain Lacayete to the city of Otumba, state of Hidalgo, district of Apan, a distance of 27.8 miles.
The aqueduct, which is known as the Zempoala, included three arched bridges of a maximum height of 124 feet. This aqueduct is further interesting from the fact that the original agreement, under which the work was performed, is still in existence, a copy of which was published in the Engineering News, 1888, from which the following copy is taken.
The first bridge contains forty-six arches, the second thirteen arches and the third sixty-eight arches. The length of the longest bridge is 3,000 feet and the span of the arches at the springing line is fifty-six feet. About five years were required to build the principal part of the aqueduct which is carried on arches.
Contract Under Which Aqueduct was Built
I, Friar Cristobal y Chanriguis, preacher and secretary of this holy province of the holy evangel, certify that Father Luis Gerro, preacher and guardian of the Convent of All Saints, Zempoala, has presented to me a patent in favor of natives of said town, whose legal tenor is as follows:
We, Friar Juan De Bustamanti, Commissioner General of the Indes of the Ocean Seas, and Friar Juan De San Francisco, Provincial Master of the province of said holy evangel, and Friar Deigo Nolivarte, and Friar Juan De Gavna, and Friar Antonio Centad Rodriquez, and Friar Bernardino De Sahagun, subordinate of priests of said province of the holy evangel, declare:
That inasmuch as you, the Governor Alcaldes and principal officers of the town of Zacoala, have agreed, for the love of God and because of our intercession, with the same officers of the town of Otumba to give to them half the water which you have in your town of Zacoala for the use and benefit of the inhabitants of Otumba and for the use of the monastery of our order founded in that town, in which you do great good to them and to our said monastery, because of our intercession as stated; and, inasmuch, moreover, as you, the said people of Zacoala, with much labor and for the good of your souls, agree to join with the people of the Flaquilpan and Zempoala in the place where you are erecting an All Saints Monastery, at which point you agree to remain and work and not to depart for the reason that you are removed from your own houses; on order to labor for the good of our souls and in return for the labor which the priests have in visiting you. And whereas now you will soon have together a monastery for the friars of our order, in which must be administered for all the holy sacraments; therefore, in return for this benefit and work we promise you that in all our time we will not cease to give friars for said monastery, and for the whole length of our lives we will aid you in your prayers in all the agreed respects; and for the time to come after our lives, in consideration of said benefit, we will petition the said Commissioners General and Provisional Masters that they will severally and collectively adhere to the agreement, and always have the charity to furnish friars in the Monastery of All Saints, as now in view of the great and good work which you have done through our intercession, both in giving the said water and in aiding the said work to supply it. And if by chance there should happen to be so few priests that it is impossible to spare them from the house of Otumba that they shall place friars in said Monastery of All Saints first and let the loss fall upon other places than Zacoala and the Monastery of All Saints, in all of which places you are entitled to be taught by our priests.
We will beg of our successors in charity to favor us in these said respects, in return for your faithful labor and agreement in our behalf, and so we sign this agreement, made this seventh day of February, 1553.
Then followed signatures.