The great fact can, however, be traced half a century before Jenner's time. In the journal of John Byron, F.R.S., under date June 3, 1725, it is recorded that: "At a meeting of the Royal Society, Sir Isaac Newton presiding, Dr. Jurin read a case of small-pox, where a girl who had been inoculated and had been vaccinated, was tried and had them not again; but another [a] boy, caught the small-pox from this girl, and had the confluent kind and died." This case occurred at Hanover. The inoculation of the girl seems to have failed entirely; it was suspected that she had not taken the true small-pox; doubts, however, were removed, as a boy, who daily saw the girl, fell ill and died, "having had a very bad small-pox of the confluent sort." This is the first use of the word _vaccination_, or, more familiarly, cow-pox, which is an eruption arising from the insertion into the system of matter obtained from the eruption on the teats and udders of cows, and especially in Gloucestershire; it is also frequently denominated _vaccine matter_; and the whole affair, inoculation and its consequences, is called vaccination, from the Latin _vacca_, a cow. It is admitted that Jenner's merit lay in the scientific application of his knowledge of the fact that the chapped hands of milkers of cows sometimes proved a preventive of small-pox, and from those of them whom he endeavored to inoculate resisting the infection. These results were probably known far beyond Jenner's range, and long before his time; for we have respectable testimony of their having come within the observation of a Cheshire gentleman, who had been informed of them shortly after settling on his estate in Prestbury parish, in or about 1740. This does not in the least detract from Jenner's merit, but shows that to his genius for observation, analogy, and experiment, we are indebted for this application of a simple fact, only incidentally remarked by others, but by Jenner rendered the stepping-stone to his great discovery--or, in other words, extending its benefits from a single parish in Gloucestershire to the whole world.