50 The Book of Bugs. 



'ager ' so much they didn't call the thing by hifalutin 

 names in those days was because they cleared off the 

 forests and broke up the new ground. Maybe so, but 

 I think the rain-water barrel at the corner of the house, 

 ail alive with " wiggle-tails," had a good deal to do with 

 it. It is significant, too, that the murderous fevers of 

 the West African coast coincide with swarms of mos- 

 quitoes. It has been shown that malaria among the 

 British troops stationed at Hong Kong is at its lowest 

 in February and at its highest in July. Anopheles 

 are scarcest there in February and most plentiful in 

 July. 



Still, until it was definitely proved, as in Havana, that 

 a man can be inoculated by a mosquito with yellow fever 

 and die from the disease thus clinically planted in his 

 system (a discovery in medical science hardly inferior 

 to Jenner's when he introduced vaccination), perhaps 

 the conservatives were justified in putting all their trust 

 in quinine and regarding the mosquito exterminators as 

 fussified. Quinine itself, it must be remembered, had no 

 easy time making its way into the pharmacopoeia of Prot- 

 estant Europe. It had the bad luck to have the name of 

 ' Jesuits' bark," and folk had rather burn with fever and 

 rattle their teeth with chills than countenance in any way 

 the Pope of Rome and his detestable errors. Also there 

 were several charmss that counteracted the Mortal Mind 

 that caused fever and ague. I forget most of them, but 

 one had something to do with burying a new-laid egg 

 at a cross-roads in the new of the moon and saying off 

 something. However, the hated Jesuits' bark seemed to 

 have so much better success than charms that it has 

 become very popular. I knew a Methodist minister that 

 was dead against liquor in any form, but if he wanted 

 to preach a particularly powerful sermon he used to take 



