These circumstances must naturally create in every instance some degree of painful solicitude for its consequences. But as I have never known fatal effects arise from the Cow-pox, even when impressed in the most unfavourable manner, producing extensive inflammations and suppurations on the hands; and as it clearly appears that this disease leaves the constitution in a state of perfect security from the infection of the Small-pox, may we not infer that a mode of inoculation may be introduced preferable to that at present adopted, especially among those families which, from previous circumstances, we may judge to be predisposed to have the disease unfavourably? It is an excess in the number of pustules which we chiefly dread in the Small-pox; but, in the Cow-pox, no pustules appear, nor does it seem possible for the contagious matter to produce the disease from effluvia, or by any other means than contact, and that probably not simply between the virus and the cuticle; so that a single individual in a family might at any time receive it without the risk of infecting the rest, or of spreading a distemper that fills a country with terror. [Several instances have come under my observation which justify the assertion that the disease cannot be propagated by effluvia. The first boy whom I inoculated with the matter of Cow-pox slept in a bed while the experiment was going forward, with two children who had never gone through either that disease or the Small-pox, without infecting either of them. A young woman who had the Cow-pox to a great extent, several sores which maturated having appeared on the hands and wrists, slept in the same bed with a fellow-dairymaid, who never had been infected with either the Cow-pox or the Small-pox, but no indisposition followed. Another instance has occurred of a young woman on whose hands were several large suppurations from the Cow-pox, who was at the same time a daily nurse to an infant, but the complaint was not communicated to the child.] In some other points of view the inoculation of this disease appears preferable to the variolous inoculation.