Daily Arizona silver belt., 1908-11-10
TAKING A BATH

 a divorce from her husband on the ground that he has not taken bath for seventeen years, novel complaint which only goes to strengthen the proof that divorces cases are usually unclean. Of course, the offense charged nigh. bs less grave If it had occurred any where else than in Pittsburg, but it is hard to imagine what must be the appearance of man living in that city of coal dust and grime without taking bath for seventeen years. It must, roally, have been rather hard for the mans wife to man shs married seventeen years ago, must have been pretty well hidden un- der several layers of adhesive Pittsourg atmosphere, and she WAS quite right to decline to live any longer with a stranger.
 But the plight of the Pittsburg lady, which the courts seem duly to have rec ognized and to have relieved her from. brings up the whole custom of bathing. Even in this enlightened age, when in the best-regulated families the porce- lain bath-tub is no longer used as 8 receptacle for the winter coal. there is some doubt existing as to the proper classification of the bath itself. Is it a necessity. habit, or just a luxury7
 The question will be answered, we i'm agine, as suits the individual tempera- ment, though habit of course, will have something to do with it. We imagine that most of us started out in life with a fair chance of acquiring the bathing habit, though, perhaps, 1t is fortunate that few of us can carry our minds back to that condition of abject helplsssnes5 when the mother or tho nurse insisted on plunging us into lukewarm water and stopping our unavailing protests with an excess of soap. All of us had this experience. Some of us have grown away from 1t; others, perhaps, to whom the taste of infanttle soap still clings as hated memory, deliberately decline to baths nowadays mora often than is necessary, so as to even things up, as it were.
 Some doctors, and recently professor in the University of Chicago, declare that the bath is not altogether healthy; that 1t is 8 creator of colds. conducive to Pneumonia and other diseases There may be something in this contention, for in the South Sea isles, where the natives bathe frequently in the tepid water, they are pretty sickly lot, while up in the artic, where the gentle Eskimo has his fur clothes sewed onto him and never takes bath, health and free dom from pulmonary troubles are char acteristic.
 The whole subject is broad one. It would nightly have interested Carlyle, who might we'll have considered how many of his famed "heroes" cared about bathing, and who could have set of against this fact the difference in courage between the well-bathed aris tocrats of the French revolution and the unwashed sans culottes. He would not have failed to remember, tool that had it not been for that fatal bath, Charlotte Corday could not so easily have worked her will on Marat, aud such speculation would most surely have led him to more interesting volumne than his famous essay on clothes. ~
 Undoubtedly there are gravo dangers lurking in the bath. No one can ignore these days that there are many germs latent in the water. eagerly seeking what humans they may devour; and, thinking of these things, 1t requires some courage to trust. ones carcass to the tub. Our friends, the Japanese. rec ognize this danger, and they are one of the best bathed nations on ear.;L but they know too, that heat is a destroyer of the germs. and so they put stove under their bath tubs ard the bather