Upon a general calculation, threescore persons in every hundred have the
small-pox. Of these threescore, twenty die of it in the most favourable
season of life, and as many more wear the disagreeable remains of it in
their faces so long as they live. Thus, a fifth part of mankind either
die or are disfigured by this distemper. But it does not prove fatal to
so much as one among those who are inoculated in Turkey or in England,
unless the patient be infirm, or would have died had not the experiment
been made upon him. Besides, no one is disfigured, no one has the small-
pox a second time, if the inoculation was perfect. It is therefore
certain, that had the lady of some French ambassador brought this secret
from Constantinople to Paris, the nation would have been for ever obliged
to her. Then the Duke de Villequier, father to the Duke d'Aumont, who
enjoys the most vigorous constitution, and is the healthiest man in
France, would not have been cut off in the flower of his age.

The Prince of Soubise, happy in the finest flush of health, would not
have been snatched away at five-and-twenty, nor the Dauphin, grandfather
to Louis XV., have been laid in his grave in his fiftieth year. Twenty
thousand persons whom the small-pox swept away at Paris in 1723 would
have been alive at this time. But are not the French fond of life, and
is beauty so inconsiderable an advantage as to be disregarded by the
ladies? It must be confessed that we are an odd kind of people. Perhaps
our nation will imitate ten years hence this practice of the English, if
the clergy and the physicians will but give them leave to do it; or
possibly our countrymen may introduce inoculation three months hence in
France out of mere whim, in case the English should discontinue it
through fickleness.

I am informed that the Chinese have practised inoculation these hundred