he safety of the experiment could have induced him to hazard it.

I know not whether it be worth relating, that when sent for to a
nobleman, at Buxton, who conceived his health to have suffered by the
use of tea, to which he was immoderately addicted, Darwin rang the bell,
and ordered a pot of strong green tea to be brought up, and, filling
both his patient's cup and his own, encouraged him to frequent and
lavish draughts. I have heard that he was impatient of inquiries which
related to diet; thinking, I suppose, that after the age of childhood,
in ordinary cases, each person might regulate it best for himself. But
from an almost entire abstinence from fermented liquors, he was, both by
precept and example, a strenuous adviser. "He believed," says Miss
Edgeworth, in her Memoirs of her Father, "that almost all the distempers
of the higher classes of people arise from drinking, in some form or
other, too much vinous spirit. To this he attributed the aristocratic
disease of gout, the jaundice, and all bilious or liver complaints; in
short all the family of pain. This opinion he supported in his writings
with the force of his eloquence and reason; and still more in
conversation, by all those powers of wit, satire, and peculiar humour,
which never appeared fully to the public in his works, but which gained
him strong ascendancy in private society. During his lifetime, he almost
banished wine from the tables of the rich of his acquaintance; and
persuaded most of the gentry in his own and the neighbouring counties to
become water-drinkers." Here, I doubt, Miss Edgeworth has a little
over-rated the extent of his influence. "Partly in jest, and partly in
earnest, he expressed his suspicions, and carried his inferences on this
subject, to a preposterous excess. When he heard that my father was
bilious, he suspected that this must be the consequence of his having,
since his residence in Ireland, and in compliance with the fashion of
the country, indulged too freely in drinking. His letter, I remember,
concluded with--Farewell, my dear friend. God keep you from whiskey--if
he can."

His opinion respecting the safety of inoculating for the small-pox at a
proper age, as it was expressed in the following letter to the writer of
these pages, will be satisfactory to such parents as are yet unconvinced
of the efficacy of vaccination; and his opinion is the more valuable,
because it was given at a time when there was neither prejudice nor