ON THE VARIOLA OR SMALL-POX OF SHEEP. 629 
All animals, not excepting birds, have a pustular eruptive dis- 
ease peculiar to their respective species, which simulates small- 
pox, but which cannot at all times, or I may say seldom, be pro- 
pagated from one to the other. 
The French have made varied and numerous experiments to 
ascertain whether, by vaccinating sheep with the matter of cow- 
pox, it would not protect them from the small-pox ; it however 
failed in doing so : the fever never developed itself properly in 
them, and the pock was very imperfectly formed ; but when ino- 
culated afterwards with the matter of small-pox, they immediately 
took the disease, and also caught it equally by infection. W,hen 
the animal was inoculated with small-pox matter first, and after 
its recovery vaccinated, it was no longer susceptible of the action 
of the vaccine matter, even locally. 
Nor is vaccination in the human subject any protection against 
small-pox : it appears to possess only the negative merit of super- 
seding and preventing inoculation with small-pox matter, by this 
means preserving us to a great extent from so fearful a scourge. 
This is no more than we might expect from the experiments de- 
tailed above, and from other facts ; as it is contrary to the laws of 
nature that matter of a specific kind , having its own specific fever , 
should supersede matter of another specific kind also having its 
own specific fever. My daughter, grown up to womanhood, as 
well as a friend of her’s of equal age, both having been vaccinated , 
caught the small-pox by visiting some poor people where it ex- 
isted. My daughter had it severely, yet she recovered, but her 
friend died : my son’s nurse and child, and my youngest son, then 
took it, although vaccinated : — the nurse had it also severely. At 
this period it pervaded the district, many respectable people, as 
well as the poor, taking it : some died, and others were badly 
marked. Numbers of these cases had been carefully vaccinated. 
All these facts tend to the conclusion arrived at : — there is a marked 
distinction betwixt the characters of the cow-pox and small-pox; 
the former is simply contagious : small-pox is both contagious and 
highly infectious, therefore placing the two at rather antagonistical 
points. 
But I consider the evil of vaccination does not terminate simply 
in a false protective security ; it also from its virulent origin, — viz. 
(according to the philanthropic Jenner himself) from the greasy 
heel of a horse ; or, I should rather suspect, more likely from the 
fouls of a cow, that local affection being similar in its physical 
characters to the grease in the horse, which, when the animal lies 
down, gets introduced into the system by coming in contact from 
betwixt the claws with the abraded mammae — produces or lays the 
