ON THE ADVISABLENESS OF IMPROVING 

 NATURAL KNOWLEDGE 



(1866) 



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 



5 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 

 10 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, The 

 History of the Plague Year, Defoe shows death, with 

 15 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 denuncia- 

 tions and mad prayers of fanatics; and by the madder 

 20 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 



25 remnant of the people began to toil at the accustomed round 



28 



