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ON THE ADVISABLENESS OF IMPROVING 

 NATUKAL KNOWLEDGE. 



THIS time two hundred years figo 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. 



Y T ithin 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, 1 , 

 " The History of the 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 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 



B 



