all in his power to alleviate the sufferings of the inmates. At Cherson, in the distant region of Russian Tartary, his visits to the infectious hospitals brought upon him the attacks of a severe fever-a species of plague-under which his constitution gave way. Every attention was paid to him by the authorities, but nothing could save his life, which he gave up, with pious resignation and hope, on the morning of the 20th of January, 1790.

Thus died one of the brightest ornaments of English biography; a person whose name is associated with all that is virtuous and benevolent, and who will be remembered, with feelings of admiration and respect, for numberless ages, in every part of the civilized world.

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EDWARD JENNER was born in 1749, at Berkeley, in Gloucestershire, England, of which his father was vicar. He was educated at Cirencester, and apprenticed to Mr. Ludlow, a surgeon at Sudbury. At the conclusion of his apprenticeship, he went to London and became a pupil of John Hunter, with whom he resided for two years, while studying medicine at St. George's hospital, and with whom his philosophical habits of mind and his love of natural history procured him an intimate and lasting friendship. In 1773, he returned to his native village, and practised as a surgeon and apothecary till 1792, when he

determined to confine himself to medicine, and obtained the degree of M. D., at St. Andrew's University.

The history of Dr. Jenner's professional life is embodied in that of vaccination. While at Sudbury, he was surprised one day at hearing a country woman say she could not take the small-pox, because she had had the cow-pox; and, upon inquiry, he learned that it was a popular notion in that district, that milkers who had been infected with a peculiar eruption, which sometimes occurred on the udder of the cow, were completely secure against the small-pox. The medical men of the district told him that the security which it gave was not perfect; they had long known the opinion, and it had been communicated to Sir George Baker, but he neglected it as a popular error.

Jenner, during his pupilage, repeatedly mentioned the facts, which had from the first made a deep impression upon him, to John Hunter; but even he disregarded them, and all to whom the subject was broached, either slighted or ridiculed it. Jenner, however, still pursued it. He found, when in practice at Berkeley, that there were some persons to whom it was impossible to give small-pox by inoculation, and that all these had had cow-pox; but that there were others who had experienced it, and who yet received small-pox. This, after much labor, led him to the discovery that the cow was subject to a variety of eruptions, of which one only had the power of guarding from small-pox, and that this, which he called the true cow-pox, could be effectually communicated to the milkers at only one period of its course.

It was about the year 1780, that the idea first struck him that it might be possible to propagate the cow-pox, first from the cow to the human body, and thence from one person to another. In 1788, he carried a drawing of the casual disease, as seen on the hands of milkers, to London, and showed it to Hunter, Cline and others; but still, none would either assist or encourage him; scepticism or ridicule met him everywhere, and it was not till 1796, that he made the decisive experiment. On the 14th of May, a day still commemorated by an annual festival at Berlin, a boy, aged eight years, was vaccinated with matter taken from the hands of a milkmaid; he passed through the disorder in a satisfactory manner, and was inoculated for small-pox on the 1st July following, without the least effect.

Jenner then entered upon an extensive series of experiments of the same kind, and, in 1798, published his first memoir, "An Inquiry into the Causes and Effects of the Variola Vaccine." It excited the greatest interest, for the evidence in it seemed conclusive; yet the practice met with opposition as severe as it was unfair, and its success seemed uncertain till a year had passed, when upwards of seventy of the principal physicians and surgeons in London signed a declaration of their entire confidence in it. An attempt was then made to deprive Jenner of the merit of his discovery, but it signally failed, and scientific honors were bestowed upon him from all quarters. Nothing, however, could induce him to leave his native village, and all his correspondence shows that the purest benevolence, rather than ambition, had been the

motive which actuated his labors.

"Shall I," said he

in a letter to a friend, "who, even in the morning of my life, sought the lowly and sequestered paths of life, the valley and not the mountain,-shall I, now my evening is fast approaching, hold myself up as an object for fortune and for fame? My fortune, with what flows in from my profession, is amply sufficient to gratify my wishes."

Till the last day of his life, which terminated suddenly in 1823, he was occupied in the most anxious labors to diffuse the advantages of his discovery both at home and abroad; and he had the satisfaction of knowing that vaccination had even then shed its blessings over every civilized nation of the world, prolonging life, and preventing the ravages of the most terrible scourge to which the human race was subject.

Jenner's other works all evince the same patient and philosophic spirit which led him to his great discovery. The chief of them was a paper, "On the Natural History of the Cuckoo," in which he first described that bird's habit of laying its eggs singly in the nests of smaller species, to whom it leaves the office of incubation and of rearing the young one, which, when a few days old, acquires the sole possession of the nest by the expulsion of its rightful occupants.

The life of Jenner is not without its moral. The history of his great discovery affords a striking instance of the difficulties which often attend the promulgation of truth, even though it may be of the greatest consequence to mankind; and it also shows