THE CAXAniAN ENTOMOLOGIST. 105 



INSECTS AND DISEASE. 



•' The Prevention of Malaria," by Ronald Ross, with contiibutions by- 

 other authorities. XIII — 669 pp., with plates. (London : John 

 Murray.) 



Insects and Disease," by R. W, Doane. XIV — 227 pp., 112 figs. 

 (American Nature Series, New York : Henry Holt & Company.) 



If the goal of civilization is the supremacy of man over the antago- 

 nistic forces of nature, then the part which the entomologist is playing in 

 enabling the human race to reach that goal is no small one. No other 

 branch of entomological study has drawn the attention of men, and in 

 particular of statesmen, to the importance which insects play in the 

 economy of mankind, as that which deals with the direct relationship of 

 insects to man as the carriers of disease. When an insect-borne disease 



is responsible in India alone for an annual mortality of over a million 

 people, when another exacts a penalty of fifty thousand lives from the 

 French as a toll for cutting a portion of the Panama canal, and a third 

 disease in a few years results in the loss of over two hundred thousand 

 lives in Central Africa, it is then that the importance of insects, as the 

 necessary hosts of such diseases as Malaria, Yellow Fever and Sleeping 

 Sickness, is recognized. At the anniversary meeting of the Royal 

 Society, held in December, Lord Robson gave an indication of the forcible 

 manner in which these questions are appealing to men of to-day. He 

 remarked that it is the man of science who is to decide the fate of the 

 tropics, not the soldier or the statesman with his programmes and 

 perorations, but the quiet entomologist. He is the man of science who 

 above all others strikes popular imagination the least and gets less of 

 popular prestige, but he has begun a fascinating campaign for the sanitary 

 conquest of those enormous tracts of the earth, and before long he will 

 have added their intensely fertile soil, almost as a free gift, to the 

 productive resources of the human race. Coming from one who is not a 

 scientist, this statement is all the more significant of the trend of opinion 

 among our public men. The mosquito is shown to be the factor which 

 has prevented the opening up of enormous areas of Africa, and likewise 

 the tse-tse fly by its attacks upon domestic beasts of burden ; the 

 flea is proven to be the means of disseminating the plague bacillus ; the 

 house-fly is condemned as a serious menace to public health as a carrier 

 of the germs of typhoid and other infectious diseases, and so the story is 



