Virginia Argus

In Acerbi's travels lately published, the production of an interesting and intelligent writer, the author, whose route was through Sweden, Finland and Lapland, gives a concise and curious account of a Finlandish bath. To a European or an American who lives in a lower latitude the toleration of so intense a heat, and the immediate transition to a degree of cold, the opposite extreme, as is related by this traveller, would seem to border on the incredible. The Finlanders enter their baths, both sexes promiscuously, and apparently without any sense of indecency ; and continue in them for a half or whole hour, when the room is heated by water thrown upon a pile of hot stones, till the thermometer (one of a hundred degrees, by Celsius) stands at the 70 or 75th degree. The author entered one of them, but the heat of it was so oppressive he was obliged immediately to leave it to avoid suffocation. Yet the inhabitants who are in the habit of bathing several times a week feel no inconvenience from the practice--but say they receive new spirits from the use of it, and leave the bath as much refreshed as after sleep or a feast. But what renders the account very singular is, that from this extraordinary degree of warmth they immediately go into the open air, when the cold is 20 or 30 degrees below zero, which is a difference of one hundred degrees, and roll themselves in the snow without the least covering over them ; while travellers are hastening in their sledges, wrapped up in the warmest furs to screen the severity of the weather. This affords us a striking reflection upon what the constitution can bear, when inured to it by constant habit. The author concludes his remarks as follows: "Had Shakespeare known of a people who could thus have pleasure in such quick transitions from excessive heat to the severest cold, his knowledge might have been increased, but his creative fancy could not have been assisted."

"Oh! who can hold a fire in his hand,
By thinking of the frosty Caucasus?
Or wallow naked in December snow
By thinking on the fantastic Summer's charms?"