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288 SCIENCE PROGRESS 



cussion amounted to little more than an ex-cathedra statement of his own 

 views ; and it appeared that he had probably never been allowed to see the 

 previous report of the Conjoint Committee, which approached him on that 

 occasion. There is a singular cruelty in the concluding part of Mr. Balfour's 

 reply. The Royal Bounty Fund is, it seems, available for the beggared 

 descendants of the nation's benefactors ; but the Lord President of the Council 

 has not gone into the question sufhciently to enable him to state whether the 

 Royal Bounty Fund is large enough for this purpose ! 



The whole question is really one of national morality. Does the country 

 wish to place itself in the position of dishonest members of the public who 

 escape paying their fees for professional services rendered to them ? At the 

 present moment a large proportion of the public get their medical benefit for 

 nothing on one pretext or another ; is the British Empire to place itself 

 finally amongst these people ? 



We would invite the comments of our readers on Mr. Balfour's reply 

 quoted above. 



On July 23 the following letter from Mr. W. Hampson, M.A., appeared 

 in The Times. 



" On the subject of Sir Ronald Ross's letter to The Times, you published 

 a letter from Mr. Tindal Robertson, secretary of the Commission for Awards 

 to Inventors of Devices useful during the war, in which he states that the 

 scale for use with my invention of an improved and quicker method of locahsa- 

 tion of foreign bodies in wounds was copyrighted by the publishers and sold 

 at a fixed price, a suggestion calculated to lead the public to suppose that I, 

 the inventor, have already been suitably rewarded in the sale, and to weaken 

 my complaint that I have not been rewarded by the Commission. It is, 

 therefore, due to me to publish the following statement : This copyright was 

 arranged without my knowledge ; I had no contract to receive any pecuniary 

 benefit, and I did actually receive no consideration of any kind for my in- 

 vention, which was freely open to the public and the soldiers to use, and was 

 very widely used in the great military hospitals. While, therefore, an 

 invention in a technical and recondite branch of science which was declared 

 by the highest authorities to be extremely ingenious and of great utility 

 and widely employed met with rejection, the Royal Commission gave a 

 considerable award to the inventor of an improvement in nosebags for 

 horses ! " 



Burning Mosquitoes (R. R.) 



The Chief Sanitary Inspector of Cyprus, Mr. Mehmet Aziz, has sent me 

 the following interesting note in connection with his long-continued efforts 

 to reduce malaria in the island : 



" The anti-malarial campaign which Sir Ronald Ross recommended after 

 his visit to Cyprus in 1913 was followed by an annual decrease in malarial 

 fever until last year, when a serious outbreak occurred at Famagusta. Nearly 

 all the surface waters in Cyprus dry up towards the end of May, but last 

 year there were exceptionally late rains and the large fresh-water lake near 

 Famagusta did not dry up as soon as usual. About the end of May 1920 I 

 was informed that the neighbourhood was infested with mosquitoes and that 

 a search for Anopheline breeding-places had been made without success. I 

 visited Famagusta, and found a great number of Anopheline mosquitoes 

 sheltering in caves and in the underground cisterns of the old fortress, but I 

 could not at first discover where they were breeding. The lake seemed to be 

 the only possible place, and, after a long search, I found, towards the centre 

 of the lake, Anopheline larvae in enormous numbers. 



" The lake is, unfortunately, a difficult breeding-place to deal with, and I 

 decided to try to destroy the adult mosquitoes by burning them in the caves 

 and cisterns, which are very numerous in this locality. 



