68 Proceedings of the Newport Natural History Society. 
the worm than the worm as a benefactor to our race. 
Jenner would not at all consent to this. He pointed out 
that in their movements under ground they left a trail of 
mucus behind them which became a fertilizer to the plants, 
and that by assisting in breaking the stiff clods to pieces, 
they divided and comminuted the soil. This holding to his 
point, no matter who his opponent, was the same charac¬ 
teristic that gave him courage to vaccinate his own child 
while his friends were still querying as to its advantage or 
safety. 
He saw all things, however repulsive, in their higher, 
even poetical light. When Charles James Fox, then greatly 
opposed to vaccination, asked him what the cow-pox variola 
was like, Jenner replied at once, referring also to the sur¬ 
rounding so-called areola, and the similarity is singularly 
exact, “Why, it is exactly like the section of a pearl upon 
a roseleaf. ” 
He built, as a philosopher, upon so secure a foundation 
that it was unnecessary ever to change. A very few days 
before he died, he said, “My opinion of vaccination is pre¬ 
cisely as it was when I promulgated the discovery. It is 
not in the least strengthened by any event that has hap¬ 
pened, for it could gain no strength; it is not in the least 
weakened, for if failures had not happened, the truth of my 
assertions concerning those coincidences which occasioned 
them would not have been made out.” 
His tastes were simple and most retiring. He wrote to 
a friend, after his success had attained full flood: “Shall 
I, who even in the morning of my days, sought the lowly 
and sequestered paths of life, —the valley, and not the 
mountain, — shall I, now my evening is fast approaching, hold 
myself up as an object for fortune and for fame ? My for¬ 
tune, with what flows in from my profession, is amply 
sufficient to gratify my wishes. And as for fame, what is 
it ? A gilded butt, forever pierced with the arrows of malig¬ 
nancy. The name of John Hunter stamps this observation 
with the signature of truth.” 
