Hunter died in 1793, and there is no evidence that Jenner submitted to his judgment the question of Vaccination, if even we allow that prior to that date the project had occurred to Jenner himself. It is certain that he mentioned to Hunter that country folk believed that to catch cowpox was to be secure from smallpox, and that Hunter repeated the fact in his conversation and lectures; but there is no reference to the matter in Hunter’s writing and correspondence. It is the habit of Jenner’s admirers to represent him as a patient investigator to whom a great thought dawned in boyhood, which was brought forth in the maturity of life. In conformity with this legend, it is related that when an apprentice at Sodbury, a young woman came to his master’s surgery, and smallpox being mentioned, she said, “I cannot take that disease, for I have had cowpox;” and her observation was pondered in his heart; whereon Dr. Baron, his biographer, ecstatically launches forth-- Newton had unfolded his doctrine of light and colours before he was twenty: Bacon wrote his _Temporis Partus Maximus_ before he attained that age: Montesquieu had sketched his _Spirit of Laws_ at an equally early period of life: and Jenner, when he was still younger, contemplated the possibility of removing from among the list of human diseases one of the most mortal that ever scourged our race. The hope of doing this great good never deserted him, though he met with many discouragements; his notions having been treated with scorn and ridicule by some, and with indifference by almost all. Against such a paragraph we may write, Sheer romance! Jenner was by no means reticent, and that the prevention of smallpox was for any length of time the burden of his soul, nowhere appears. The romance came into being after date in order to make much of little, and to justify payment in cash and reputation. For, taking Vaccination at the utmost, it was a slight advance upon existent knowledge and practice. In the first place, it was a notorious belief in many dairy districts, that to contract cowpox was equivalent to smallpox in averting a subsequent attack of smallpox. In the second place, inoculation with smallpox was the custom of the time; and if infection with cowpox prevented smallpox, why should not inoculation with cowpox do so as effectually as inoculation with smallpox? The intelligence requisite to reach a conclusion so obvious was not great, and therefore it was no cause for surprise that when Jenner’s claim as originator of Vaccination was brought forward, his priority should be disputed from several quarters; as by Benjamin Jesty of Yetminster, who inoculated his wife and sons with cowpox in 1774; by Nash of Shaftesbury; Mrs. Rendall, and others. Jenner was not insensible to the force of these claims, but evaded them under the plea that there was cowpox _and_ cowpox, and that he had discovered and defined the right sort.