FIGHTING THE INSECTS 



is the responsibility. And I don't believe that they feel weighed 

 down by it, either." 



This was a graceful and altogether too modest statement, but 

 I was delighted to hear it, as it brought my name in. 



But to go back to malaria. Of course the great impetus of 

 Ross's discovery in Calcutta was largely responsible for the fact 

 that Walter Reed took up so enthusiastically his investigations 

 into yellow fever at Havana. He had been much at the Johns 

 Hopkins Laboratories in Baltimore and knew Dr. W. S. Thayer, 

 who had just returned from Italy. Thayer, who had been a great 

 student of malaria, went to Italy to study the results gained by 

 Battista Grassi and his colleagues, who, it will be remembered, 

 disputed with Ross the discovery of the carriage of human mala- 

 ria by Anopheles, or, at least, the priority of this discovery. I re- 

 member well that after this trip Thayer came over to Washington 

 to talk to me about the simplest way to differentiate Anopheles 

 from other mosquitoes. I had pointed out in my publications 

 that in one of the sexes of Anopheles the labial palpi are almost 

 as long as the proboscis, whereas in the corresponding sex of 

 Culex they are very short. Thayer came to me with the astound- 

 ing statement that he had found the palpi to be much longer 

 than the proboscis, and when I came to examine his specimens 

 I found that he had mistaken the front legs for the palpi. 

 Rather a good joke on so eminent a man! 



I had been corresponding with Ross and had sent him my 

 publications, and he in return had sent me his admirable little 

 book entitled "Mosquito Brigades." And then in the summer of 

 1905 the Board of Directors of the International Exposition held 

 at St. Louis organized an International Congress of Arts and 

 Sciences and sent Simon Newcomb (who was to be the presi- 

 dent of the congress), Hugo Miinsterberg of Harvard, and 

 Professor Small, the economist, of the University of Chicago, 



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