ON THE ADVISABLENESS OF 

 IMPROVING NATURAL KNOWLEDGE 



[1866] 



THIS time two hundred years ago in the 

 beginning of January, 1666 those of our fore- 

 fathers who inhabited this great and ancient 

 city, took breath between the shocks of two fear- 

 ful calamities: one not quite past, although its 

 fury had abated ; the other to come. 



Within a few yards of the very spot on which wo 

 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 

 < -a j lit al, 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 



