Accordingly, Dr. Woodville, who fills that department with so much respectability, took an early opportunity of instituting an inquiry into the nature of the Cowpox. This inquiry was begun in the early part of 1799, and in May, Dr. Woodville published the result, which differs essentially from mine in a point of much importance. It appears that three-fifths of the patients inoculated were affected with eruptions, for the most part so perfectly resembling the Smallpox, as not to be distinguished from them. On this subject it is necessary that I should make some comments. Woodville, whose experiments were as a hundred to one of his patronising critic, and informed with purpose too, must have received this languid commendation of his country acquaintance with some surprise, if not with fierier sentiment. Jenner as an investigator was never of much account. Of what constitutes scientific demonstration, he had little perception. Incapable and indolent, he nevertheless was ambitious, and had the craft to appropriate the research of others, and with assurance so ineffable that even the plundered fell under the persuasion that what he took was somehow his own. For example, the occurrence of smallpox and cowpox simultaneously in Woodville’s practice, which he had not foreseen, nor could any foresee, he first used as a pretext for lofty reprehension toward Woodville, and then converted into evidence of his own prescience, saying-- In my first publication I expressed an opinion that the Smallpox and the Cowpox were the same disease under different modifications. In this opinion, Dr. Woodville has concurred. The axiom of the immortal Hunter, that two diseased actions cannot take place at the same time in one and the same part, will not be injured by the admission of this theory. Mark the adroit oblivion and the adroit attachment. It was horsegrease that he assumed to be the origin of smallpox through cowpox; and the cowpox used by Woodville was Jenner’s condemned cowpox, underived from the horse; yet the inconvenient was passed over, and the convenient assumed! Possibly cowpox and smallpox are forms of the same disease: possibly they are not: possibly all diseases are forms of one disease: possibly they are not: but whatever the fact, Jenner had not an iota of evidence to adduce for his conjecture that grease in horses, and pox from that grease in cows, was a modification of smallpox in men. As we review these early days of the New Inoculation, nothing so stirs regret as what appears to have been the wilful shutting of men’s eyes to facts--to notorious facts. It was well known in Gloucestershire, that whilst the vulgar supposed that cowpox prevented smallpox, it did not do so. Indeed, it was under stress of this knowledge that Jenner rejected cowpox _per se_ for horsegrease cowpox. In the _Gloucester Journal_ of 9th May, 1799, Mr. C. Cooke wrote--