the surgeon-general of the United States enumerates the ailments for which the sick should be sent to the army and navy hospital at the Hot Springs.  It says, “Relief may be reasonably expected at the Hot Springs in the following conditions:  In the various forms of gout and rheumatism after the acute or inflammatory stage; neuralgia, especially when depending upon gout; rheumatism, metallic, or malarial poisonings, paralysis, not of organic origin; the earlier stages of locomotor ataxia; chronic Bright’s disease (early stages only), and other diseases of the urinary organs; functional diseases of the liver; gastric dyspepsia, not of the organic origin; chronic diarrhea; catarrhal affections of the digestive and respiratory tracts; chronic skin diseases, especially the squamous varieties, and chronic conditions due to malarial infection.” 
      Approved, Geo. H. TORNEY, Surgeon-General U. S. Army. 
J.M.  Dickerson, Secretary of War.

Privileges of Ex-Soldiers of the Civil and Spanish-American Wars.—­Honorably discharged soldiers of thc Civil war, and the Spanish-American war, can obtain admission to the army and navy hospital at Hot Springs in the following manner, and under certain conditions: 

First.—­Write to the Surgeon-General, United States Army, Washington, D. c., for blank applications and instructions.

Second.—­Upon receiving the blank application, fill it out properly, and return it to the Surgeon-General, when, if there is room in the hospital, he will forward to the applicant papers entitling him to admission to the hospital.  The conditions are that such ex-soldier shall pay forty cents per day during the period he remains at the hospital.  Such payment entitles him to board, lodging, baths, medical treatment and medicine.

      Hot springs of Arkansas 667

Free Baths for the Indigent People of the United States.—­By act of congress approved December 16th, 1878, the government maintains a free bath house for the indigent people of the United States of both sexes.  No baths will be supplied except on written applications made on blanks furnished at the office of the bath house, making full answer to the questions therein propounded:  then if the applicant is found to be indigent, in accordance with the common acceptations of the word, the manager will issue a ticket good for twenty-one baths, which may be reissued on the same application if necessary.  The daily average of baths given at the free bath house for the year 1909 was more than six hundred.

The government is very broad and liberal in construing the meaning of the word indigent; and the fact that the applicant for free baths has some property, seems not to act as a bar to the privilege of free baths.  Ninety per cent of the patients admitted to the Army and Navy Hospital are either cured or relieved.  Taking into consideration the large number of old civil war veterans treated at the hospital, whose ailments have become chronic, this is a very remarkable showing.