prepossession on the subject.

_Derby, Oct_. 9, 1797.

Dear Sir,--On the best inquiry I have been able to make to-day, I
cannot hear that the small-pox is in Derby. I can only add, that all
those who have died by inoculation, whom I have heard of these last
twenty years, have been children at the breast; on which account it
may be safer to defer inoculation till four or five years old, if
there be otherwise no hazard of taking the disease naturally.

I am, &c.

E. DARWIN.

On the accounts which his patients gave him of their own maladies, he
placed so little dependence, that he thought it necessary to wring the
truth from them as a lawyer would do from an unwilling witness. His
general distrust of others, in all that related to themselves, is well
exemplified by a casual remark that has been lately repeated to me by a
respectable dignitary of the church, to whom when he was apologizing for
his want of skill in the game of chess, at which they were going to
play, Darwin answered, that he made it a rule, not to believe either the
good or the harm that men spoke of themselves.

This want of reliance in the sincerity of those with whom he conversed
has been attributed, with some colour of reason, to his habitual
scepticism on matters of higher moment. Mr. Fellowes has observed of
him, that he dwelt so much and so exclusively on second causes, that he
seems to have forgotten that there is a first. There is no solution of
natural effects to which he was not ready to listen, provided it would
assist him in getting rid of what he considered an unnecessary
intervention of the Supreme Being. A fibre capable of irritability was
with him enough to account, not only for the origin of animal life, but
for its progress through all its stages. He had thus involved himself in
the grossest materialism; but, being endued with an active fancy, he
engendered on it theories so wild and chimerical, that they might be
regarded with the same kind of wonder as the fictions of romance, if our
pleasure were not continually checked by remembering the error in which
they originate. What more prodigious transformation shall we read of in
Ovid, than that which he supposes the organs of his strange ens to have
undergone during the change of our globe from moist to dry?

As in dry air the sea-born stranger roves,
Each muscle quickens, and each sense improves;
Cold gills aquatic form respiring lungs,
And sounds aerial