I do not mean to insinuate that exposure to cool air, and suffering the patient to drink cold water when hot and thirsty, may not moderate the eruptive symptoms and lessen the number of pustules; yet, to repeat my former observation, I cannot account for the uninterrupted success, or nearly so, of one practitioner, and the wretched state of the patients under the care of another, where, in both instances, the general treatment did not differ essentially, without conceiving it to arise from the different modes of inserting the matter for the purpose of producing the disease.  As it is not the identical matter inserted which is absorbed into the constitution, but that which is, by some peculiar process in the animal economy, generated by it, is it not probable that different parts of the human body may prepare or modify the virus differently?  Although the skin, for example, adipose membrane, or mucous membranes are all capable of producing the variolous virus by the stimulus given by the particles originally deposited upon them, yet I am induced to conceive that each of these parts is capable of producing some variation in the qualities of the matter previous to its affecting the constitution.  What else can constitute the difference between the smallpox when communicated casually or in what has been termed the natural way, or when brought on artificially through the medium of the skin?

After all, are the variolous particles, possessing their true specific and contagious principles, ever taken up and conveyed by the lymphatics unchanged into the blood vessels?  I imagine not.  Were this the case, should we not find the blood sufficiently loaded with them in some stages of the smallpox to communicate the disease by inserting it under the cuticle, or by spreading it on the surface of an ulcer?  Yet experiments have determined the impracticability of its being given in this way; although it has been proved that variolous matter, when much diluted with water and applied to the skin in the usual manner, will produce the disease.  But it would be digressing beyond a proper boundary to go minutely into this subject here.

At what period the cow-pox was first noticed here is not upon record.  Our oldest farmers were not unacquainted with it in their earliest days, when it appeared among their farms without any deviation from the phaenomena which it now exhibits.  Its connection with the smallpox seems to have been unknown to them.  Probably the general introduction of inoculation first occasioned the discovery.

Its rise in this country may not have been of very remote date, as the practice of milking cows might formerly have been in the hands of women only; which I believe is the case now in some other dairy countries, and, consequently, that the cows might not in former times have been exposed to the contagious matter brought by the men servants from the heels of horses. [Footnote:  I have been informed from respectable authority that