Extract

While recently making a complete examination of all our public sulphur springs, I was much impressed with the enormous quantities of salines which must be discharged annually by the sulphurous and ferruginous waters of Harrogate; not only by those employed medicinally, but including the innumerable oozings in the beds of streams, and more particularly in various parts of the surface of the Bog-Field.

Having determined the yields of a large number of the springs which up to the present had been only roughly estimated, I have had data before me to calculate with an approximation to correctness, the output of solid constituents by our mineral waters; a matter which I hope will be of some interest to geologists, and I trust may lead to some explanation whence such vast quantities are derived.

To commence with the Old Sulphur Well—the central well with which the History of Harrogate has been, and will always be indissolubly connected—and the other springs in the cellars of the Royal Pump Room, these eight wells yield 240,000 galls, per annum.

In the Bog-Field are 21 sulphur and 14 chalybeate wells; attached to the Victoria Baths are the Old Crescent Well, Leamington Spa, and five other mineral waters; contiguous to the Royal Pump Room is the Well of Litigation, approaching in strength the Old Sulphur Well, and which, fifty years ago, was the cause of a law-suit, and the perpetration of a pun by the presiding judge about “ letting well alone.”

This litigation produced ...