192 FLORIDA.

and percolation through the soil is very extreme, furnish,
in connection with the soft and charming breezes from the
Gulf or ocean, a desirable humidity in the long intervals
between the rains, characteristic of that section during a
large part of the year, and to such extent, specially in the
winter, as to constitute it the 'dry season as compared to
the wet season' from July to September. Without,
then, intending to ignore the advantages of the winter cli-
mate of the Southern States generally, and especially the
piny and sandy sections of Georgia, the Carolinas, and
Northern and Middle Florida, and in some exceptional sea-
sons of the San Antonio regions of Texas, my advice to the
invalid seeking a reliable and genial climate for the cold
season is, to ship from Jacksonville (the point of steamboat
departure from the upper or lower St. John's River, as you
may prefer to term it), two hundred miles by water, for
Sanford, or Enterprise, on that magnificent expansion of the
St. John's called Lake Monroe, at the head of large-steam-
boat navigation. And, as the invalid will not go where he
can not find comfortable accommodations, it is well to state
that here and in the adjacent sections of park-like, rolling
pines in the counties of Orange and Volusia, good hotels
and boarding-houses have already sprung up where but a
few years ago was a primeval forest. .
 "But, however necessary, attractive, and useful such
public-houses are, it is not in luxurious and crowded hotels
that the highest conditions for .health anywhere, and espe-
cially for 'climate-cure,' are found; and, instead of loung-
ing m the hotels of Jacksonville, St. Augustine, and many
other points of interest to the mere pleasure-seeker upon
the St. John's or in this region, I would advise, as an im-
portant factor in a thorough test of this climate, at least in
diseases of the lungs, that the invalid should be as much
segregated as possible, and where practicable that he should
have his own house, however simple and inexpensive it may
be, and that it should be surrounded by groves, gardens,
and vineyards, as an interesting and valuable resource for
both pleasure and profit to the health, even if there should
be no occasion for it to the pocket."
 For more specific details and tabulated data, I am per-
mitted to draw largely upon an address on the "Climatol-