SMALLPOX MADE MILDER.
As vaccination failed to afford the protection originally guaranteed, various explanations were devised to enable those who had talked too loftily to eat humble pie without painful observation. One of the commonest excuses was that if vaccination did not prevent smallpox it made it milder: and inasmuch as no one knew, or could know, how severe any attack of smallpox would have been without vaccination, it was an assertion as indisputable as the reverse—namely, that vaccination not only made smallpox severer, but frequently induced the disease. There are many assertions with which there is no reckoning, for it would require omniscience to check them. Let us beware of such assertions. Let us neither make them, nor suffer ourselves to be imposed upon by them.