The confusion of thought which has brought the unnatural practices of inoculation into fashion may be usefully illustrated by dwelling on the mingling of truth and error which exists in relation to vaccination. Vaccination must not be confounded with inoculation, although the word ‘vaccination’ is now incorrectly used by bacteriologists to cover up the alarming practice of injecting the diluted virus of any particular disease, which is inoculation. Vaccination, on the other hand, is solely the injection of matter derived from a disease in the vacca, which disease is neither small-pox nor derived from small-pox, and vaccinia in a healthy cow is a mild disease. During a lifetime of medical practice I have vaccinated children (sharing the widespread belief that it was preventive of small-pox). The practice, however, has always seemed to be an unsatisfactory method, which I hoped increased knowledge of sanitation would enable us to improve. I also recognised the powerful influence of fear in predisposing to disease, and I regarded vaccination as a sedative for the family or community. My faith in the innocence of this practice was, however, rudely shaken by the lamentable death, in my own practice, of a scrofulous infant--a death clearly caused by the phagedenic ulceration produced by the vaccination. I also noted the accumulating evidence of very serious diseases communicated by so-called vaccine lymph. _Vaccination not Scientific._--But Professor Crookshank, in his exhaustive work lately published on vaccination, has conclusively proved the unscientific character of the evidence on which this practice is based, our ignorance of the sources of the virus commonly used and its mode of action, and also the uncertainty of its prophylactic power.[6] That the generally mild disorder of vaccination, although arbitrarily and even tyrannically enforced on every child born in our country, does not prove the prevention of small-pox which it is claimed to be, is shown by the recurrence of epidemics of small-pox amongst us, by the occurrence of the disease in vaccinated persons, and also by the demand now made by the French Academy of Medicine (which recognises the failure of our system of vaccination) for legislative powers to compel repeated revaccination. This demand for power of indefinite revaccination is a logical demand. For, proceeding on the assumed premiss that vaccination prevents small-pox, but being met by the inexorable fact that epidemics of small-pox _do_ occur and spread amongst vaccinated people, the cause of this contradiction is assumed to be that the supposed preventive power of vaccination has been thrown out of the system, and must therefore be again renewed. Logically, therefore, not only the infant must be subjected, but the child, the adolescent, and the adult. All must be compulsorily revaccinated, as the human system undergoes a change at each of those periods of growth.