52 DISCOURSE ON THE STUDY 



person infallibly repays itself with interest, though 

 often in a way that could never have been at first 

 contemplated. 



(44.) It is to such observation, reflected upon, how- 

 ever, and matured into a rational and scientific form 

 by a mind deeply imbued with the best principles of 

 sound philosophy, that we owe the practice of vaccin- 

 ation ; a practice which has effectually subdued, in 

 every country where it has been introduced, one of 

 the most frightful scourges of the human race, and 

 in some extirpated it altogether. Happily for us 

 we know only by tradition the ravages of the small- 

 pox, as it existed among us hardly more than a cen- 

 tury ago, and as it would in a few years infallibly 

 exist again, were the barriers which this practice, 

 and that of inoculation, oppose to its progress 

 abandoned. Hardly inferior to this terrible scourge 

 on land was, within the last seventy or eighty years, 

 the scurvy at sea. The sufferings and destruction 

 produced by this horrid disorder on board our ships 

 when, as a matter of course, it broke out after a few 

 months' voyage, seem now almost incredible. Deaths 

 to the amount of eight or ten a day in a moderate 

 ship's company ; bodies sewn up in hammocks and 

 washing about the decks for want of strength and 

 spirits on the part of the miserable survivors to cast 

 them overboard ; and every form of loathsome and 

 excruciating misery of which the human frame is 

 susceptible : such are the pictures which the nar- 

 ratives of nautical adventure in those days con- 

 tinually offer.* At present the scurvy is almost 



* Journal of a Voyage to the South Seas, &c. &c. under the 

 Command of Commodore George Anson, in 17401744, by 



