Everlasting security from smallpox! Such was the unqualified promise, and with how little warrant! In presence of a Socratic inquirer with his persistent, how do you know? Jenner must have stood confounded. A letter to Jenner from Dr. Percival, also contains some remarks worth notice. He wrote-- MANCHESTER, _20th November, 1798_. The facts you have adduced incontestably prove the existence of the cowpox, and its ready communication to the human species. But a larger induction is yet necessary to evince that the virus of the Variolæ Vaccina renders the person who has been affected with it secure during the whole of life from the infection of the smallpox. Mr. Simmons, an ingenious surgeon of this town, has inoculated a human subject with the ichor issuing from what is termed the grease in horses; but the fluid introduced, though eight punctures were made, neither occasioned inflammation nor eruption; yet the same child was soon afterwards inoculated with success for the smallpox. Mr. Simmons has now engaged a herd of cows, and is busily employed in making such experiments as your publication has suggested. It is very remarkable, that the cowpox has been hitherto unnoticed in Cheshire, which is not less a dairy county than Gloucestershire, and where the office of milking is performed also by men and maid servants indiscriminately. The frequent statement that Jenner’s _Inquiry_ was at first received with indifference is entirely untrue: on the contrary, it was read with interest from the outset, and the only check he met was due to his inability to supply the demands of correspondents for samples of the precious virus. Cowpox was absent for awhile from the dairies, and great was his relief and delight when toward the end of 1798 some matter was obtained from a farm at Stonehouse wherewith on the 27th November he vaccinated the children of his friend, Henry Hicks of Eastington; “the first gentleman,” says Baron, “who had the merit of submitting his own children to the new practice.” Ere 1798 had passed away, Jenner had secured an energetic ally in Dr. George Pearson, F.R.S., Physician to St. George’s Hospital, London.[104] Pearson entered into the cowpox question with his whole heart, and constituted himself a sort of partner in Jenner’s project. He wrote to him-- LEICESTER SQUARE, _8th November, 1798_. Your name will live in the memory of mankind, as long as men possess gratitude for services and respect for benefactors; and if I can but get matter, I am much mistaken if _I do make you live for ever_. And in a more decided strain on 13th November-- I wish you could secure me matter for inoculation, because, depend upon it, a thousand inacurate but imposing cases will be published against the specific nature of the disease by persons who want to send their names abroad about anything, and who will think _you and me_ fair game.