He was born on the 17th May, 1749, at Berkeley, in Gloucestershire, of which place his father was the vicar. On leaving Dr. Washbourn's school, at Cirencester, he was apprenticed to Mr. Ludlow, a gentleman in practice as a surgeon at Sudbury, near Bristol. On the completion of his apprenticeship he came to London, and had the good fortune to be placed under the care of the celebrated John Hunter, with whom he resided for two years. The observing powers and taste for natural history which Jenner had early shown, as a boy, were quickened and fostered by the daily example and friendship of the illustrious man who, as surgeon and lecturer at St. George's Hospital, was carrying on those laborious scientific investigations, and building up that marvelous monument of his genius, which have rendered his name and fame immortal. So much skill and knowledge had been shown by Jenner in arranging the natural history collection of Sir J. Banks, to whom he had been recommended by Hunter, that he was offered the appointment of naturalist to Captain Cook's second expedition. He, however, declined this and other flattering proposals, in order to return to the rural scenes of his boyhood, and be near an elder brother who had been the guide of his orphanhood. He rapidly acquired an extensive business as a general practitioner, while his polished manners, wide culture, and kind and genial social qualifications, secured him welcome admission to the first society of his neighbourhood. His conscientious devotion to his professional duties did not, however, quell his enthusiastic love of natural history, or preclude him from gaining a distinguished reputation as a naturalist. A remarkable paper on the cuckoo, read before the Royal Society and printed in the _Transactions_, gained him the fellowship of that illustrious body. Jenner's paper established what has been properly termed the "parasitic" character of the cuckoo, _i. e._, it deposits its eggs in the nests of other birds, by whose warmth they are hatched, and by whom the young are fed. His observations have received general confirmation by subsequent observers, more especially the remarkable facts that the parent cuckoo selects the nests of those birds whose eggs require the same period of time for their incubation as its own (which are much larger), and the food of whose young is the same, viz., insects, which the young cuckoo ultimately monopolizes by ousting the young of the rightful owner of the nest.