ON THE ADVISABLENESS OF IMPROVING 

 NATURAL KNOWLEDGE 



THIS time two hundred years ago in the begin- 

 ning of January, 1666 those of our forefathers who 

 inhabited this great and ancient city, took breath be- 

 tween 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, The History of tlie Plague Year, 

 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 de- 

 spairing 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 began to toil 

 at the accustomed round of duty, or of pleasure; and 



