THE STORY OF AN ENTOMOLOGIST 



to Europe to invite personally a certain number of eminent 

 men to come over to St. Louis at the expense o£ the Exposition 

 Fund, and read papers at this great congress. Ross was one of 

 the men invited, and I met him for the first time at St. Louis. 

 He was then a vigorous, apparently athletic, youthful man, I 

 should say in his thirties. I took to him at once, and he was 

 very good to me. We hobnobbed quite a bit, since we were 

 both so interested in the mosquito question. He read a rather 

 important paper in which he went into the question of Anopheles 

 dispersion, treating it somewhat from the mathematical point 

 of view. In talking about this paper with me, he told me that 

 he was more interested in mathematics and in poetry than he 

 was in medicine or entomology. 



In the year of the St. Louis Fair, by the way, there was an 

 outbreak of yellow fever at Laredo, and the following year a 

 similar one at New Orleans — the last, we all hope and expect, 

 that will ever occur in the United States. I mention the matter 

 here incidentally because Mr. August Busck, who was then in 

 charge of the exhibit of the Bureau of Entomology at the Fair, 

 found the Yellow Fever Mosquito on the Fair Grounds and 

 breeding in some numbers. It is therefore obvious that should 

 any of the visitors to the Fair from Central American countries 

 have been infected, there would have been a catastrophic out- 

 break of the disease at St. Louis. 



In the following year I was visited in Washington by Pro- 

 fessor Rubert Boyce of the Liverpool School of Tropical Medi- 

 cine, and his friend and travelling companion. Viscount Mount- 

 morris. They came with letters of introduction from Major Ross, 

 and arrived, as I recollect, some time in August. Yellow fever 

 was then rampant in New Orleans. I had just returned from 

 Europe, and was trying to finish up accumulated business so 

 that I might go down there. Professor Boyce (afterwards Sir 



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