the act of making a purchase, or of acquiring the property of a thing for a certain price.

Buying the Refusal is giving money for the right or liberty of purchasing a thing at a fixed price in a certain time to come, and is chiefly used in dealing for shares in stock. This is sometimes also called by a cant name, buying the bear.

Buying the Small Pox, is an appellation given to a method of procuring that disease by an operation similar to inoculation. It was performed either by rubbing some of the pus taken out of a pustule of a variolous person on the skin, or by making a puncture in the skin with a pin dipped in such pus.