I 



ON THE ADVISABLENESS OF IMPROVING 

 NATURAL KNOWLEDGE. 



THIS time two hundred years ago in the beginning of January, 

 1666 those of our forefathers who inhabited this great and 

 ancient city, took breath between the shocks of two fearful 

 calamities : one not quite past, although its fury had abated ; 

 the other to come. 



Within a few yards of the very spot on which we are 

 assembled, so the tradition runs, that painful and deadly malady, 

 the plague, appeared in the latter months of 1664 ; and, though 

 no new visitor, smote the people of England, and especially of 

 her capital, with a violence unknown before, in the course of the 

 following year. The hand of a master has pictured what 

 happened in those dismal months ; and in that truest of fictions, 

 &quot; The History of the Plague Year,&quot; Defoe shows death, with 

 every accompaniment of pain and terror, stalking through the 

 narrow streets of old London, and changing their busy hum into 

 a silence broken only by the wailing of the mourners of fifty 

 thousand dead ; by the woful denunciations and mad prayers of 

 fanatics ; and by the madder yells of despairing profligates. 



But, about this time in 1666, the death-rate had sunk to 

 nearly its ordinary amount ; a case of plague occurred only here 

 and there, and the richer citizens who had flown from the pest 

 had returned to their dwellings. The remnant of the people 



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