This, too, may be observed: Pearson was not in condition to offer the manner of resistance specified. To have turned Jenner’s flank, it would have been necessary to discredit Cowpox; and Pearson was committed to Cowpox. Jenner had been familiar from youth with the dairymaids’ faith in Cowpox. Why then did he not advertise its virtue? Because it had been proved to him that the dairymaids’ confidence was illusory. His recommendation of Horsegrease Cowpox attested his distrust in Cowpox. If Pearson had asked himself, What induced Jenner to set aside Cowpox for Horsegrease Cowpox? the answer would have revealed to him a whole series of facts to the discredit of that prophylaxy of which he and Woodville had constituted themselves advocates. Thus, fettered by his own prepossession, Pearson was unable to deal effectually with Jenner without incurring a disenchantment fatal to his own enterprise. * * * * * When we recognise that Jenner’s prescription was a disease of the horse communicated to the cow, which Pearson and Woodville set aside for Cowpox, the controversy as to the originator of the use of Cowpox for inoculation loses significance. We have to assert peremptorily that Jenner had no claim to the use of Cowpox whatever. It is true that he advanced the claim in his _Origin of the Vaccine Inoculation_ in 1801, and in his Petition to Parliament in 1802; but those who refer to his _Inquiry_ of 1798 will require no further proof of his mendacity. That his claim to the use of Cowpox was entertained can only be ascribed to that indolence, ineptitude and ignorance on the part of the world whereon quacks presume and prosper. It was Pearson and Woodville, I once more repeat, who diffused and popularised Cowpox; and Pearson’s inquiries left no doubt that the faith in Cowpox as a preventive of Smallpox was widely entertained; and that the substitution of Cowpox for Smallpox in inoculation was a mere question of time and accident. Mr. Downe of Bridport informed Pearson that a surgeon in his neighbourhood suffered discredit in practice because it was reported that he inoculated with Cowpox instead of Smallpox; and the papers of Mr. Nash, surgeon, of Shaftesbury proved that in 1781 he had the project of Cowpox Inoculation distinctly before him. The evidence of Benjamin Jesty, farmer of Downshay in the Isle of Purbeck, has usually been taken as most conclusive in relation to the immanence of the New Inoculation in the common mind. Jesty was invited to London by the conductors of the Original Vaccine Pock Institution, 44 Broad Street, Golden Square; and in August, 1805, they had him with his wife and two sons under examination. In their report[130] it is said--