The Days of a Man [1880 



additional material, from which we prepared an 

 extensive treatise on the fishes from Mazatlan south- 

 ward; but specimens and manuscripts alike were 

 destroyed in the fire of 1883 at the University of 

 Indiana. 



The In 1880 the first attempt at digging a Panama 



Can" Canal was being made under the auspices of Ferdi- 

 nand de Lesseps. But living was very precarious 

 there on account of poisonous malarial fevers attrib- 

 uted then to the escape of ' miasma ' from the 

 earth, but now known to be borne from person to 

 person solely by mosquitoes. Uncertainty of life be- 

 gets moral recklessness, a fact amply verified by the 

 French engineers on the Isthmus. Of the seventy 

 or more employed there in 1880, very many had 

 passed away before 1881, when Gilbert made his 

 second visit. Later, however, as all the world knows, 

 studies of the mosquito's relationship to yellow fever 

 by Dr. Walter Reed and his colleagues showed the 

 nature and origin of the disease and its allies. And 

 now, following the extermination of the plague 

 bearer, Panama is as healthy as any hot seaport 

 can well be. 



5 



raboe In September I returned home by way of Lake 

 trout Tahoe and Salt Lake City. At Tahoe City I made 

 a collection of the lake fishes, some of them new to 

 science, giving special attention to the splendid 

 trout Salmo benshawi characteristic of those 

 waters as of all others tributary to the basin of the 

 post-glacial Lake Lahontan, which once filled the 

 interior of Nevada. 



C 230 3 



