46 Proceedings of the Newport Natural History Society. 
birth of his son Edward, who was born on May 17th, 1749, 
one hundred and forty-seven years ago, lacking three days, 
from the opening night of this festival. 
His mother’s father, Rev. Henry Hoad, had also been 
Vicar of Berkeley, the predecessor of his father in the living, 
and a prebendary in the Cathedral of Bristol. 
He had two brothers, both older than himself, one of 
them Rector of Rockhampton and Vicar of Little Bedwin, 
Wiltshire, and three sisters, one of whom, Ann, married Rev. 
Wm, Davies, Rector of Eastington, and another, Mary, mar¬ 
ried Rev. Geo. C. Black, of Norwood, Middlesex. 
His first education as a child was by his brother, Rev. 
Stephen Jenner. 
He was then placed at school at Wotton-under-Edge 
with Rev. Mr. Clissold, at which time, before he was nine 
years of age, he had made a collection of nests of the dor¬ 
mouse; and later, at Cirencester, under Rev. Dr. Washbourn. 
This neighborhood was of interesting geological formation. 
There was oolitic limestone, composed of rounded particles 
like the roe or eggs of a fish, and containing remains of 
extinct lizards, insects and the earlier British mammals, 
while the lias, another form of limestone upon which the 
oolitic hills repose, yields corallines, shells, and the bones 
of fish and great reptiles, the ichthyosaurus and plesiosaurus. 
In those days, fossil bones and shells were generally be¬ 
lieved to be mere stones of curious formation, coincident 
in shape but not identical in character with anything in 
the animal kingdom. These the school-boy Jenner collected 
assiduously, though as yet but dimly comprehending that 
to those who understood their true nature the study had 
already become an unending and glorious intellectual feast. 
He was next, in 1763, apprenticed to a surgeon and 
apothecary at Sodbury, near Bristol, Mr. Daniel Ludlow, 
and remained with him until 1770, when he was twenty- 
one. It was early in his apprenticeship that he conceived 
his great idea, and commenced his long-continued observa¬ 
tions in connection with it, that milkers who had once been 
