TENTH ANNUAL YEAR BOOK— PART IV. 105 



a disease called the hook worm, a parasite very similar to our ground 

 worm, only much smaller, and which the profane newspaper (I wish 

 those people had reverence) call the "lazy bug," claiming that it makes 

 the people of the South lazy. The fact is that it gets into their feet 

 when they are barefooted — and most of those poor southern w-hite 

 farmers go barefooted. They have no privies, or at least very few, and 

 those in bad condition. The effect of the hook worm is not merely to 

 draw the blood, but to poison the system and decrease the red corpuscles; 

 so that one-fifth of the children born down there on those farms die, and 

 the rest are comparatively feeble. I am not going to discourse to you on 

 the hook worm, but simply say that it was the developments in connec- 

 tion with the Country Life Commission that led Mr. Rockefeller to give 

 a million dollars for the purpose of cleaning up that southern country. 

 The man to vhcm the honor is duo is Dr. Stiles who was our attache. 

 He had discovered thi.s worm while spending some time in North Caro- 

 lina, and being an expert in parasitic diseases, having been employed by 

 the Department of Agriculture for three years for the purpose of advising 

 our ambassador to Germany, he knew perfectly well what physcians to 

 call and what testimony to get. 



We came across pellagra — the first time I ever hoard of it — which is 

 due, according to the best modical testimony, to the eating of grits, which 

 is a dried product of the distilleries. That disease has been taken up 

 now and discussed all over the United States, and it is a most serious 

 thing, but not serious to farmers who don't eat any moldy corn meal. 



In this same question of sanitation we came up against the smallpox 

 problem in Texas, where we mot with the Mexican who has had smallpox 

 for so many generations that he has become immune to it and simply 

 has a rash, but gives it to the white sheep shearer when he starts from 

 the south to go up north to shear the sheep. 



We found a very bad condition of things in the Middle States in 

 the shape of the country slaughter house — which is always found at a 

 slough, and no two of them together — to which the farmer sends his cows 

 that he is afraid have tuberculosis, and they are killed and the offal fed 

 to hogs, which, of course, get tuberculosis. If there is any trichina, you 

 are very apt to find it in the hogs from that country, and you find rats 

 which carry the disease, and there is no telling where that ends. It is 

 fortunate for us that we cook our meats; if we ate our ham raw, as the 

 Germans do, we would have trichina without anj' doubt. 



So much for sanitation. The thing that surprised me was that in 

 the thirty states that we visted there were more complaints about our 

 common school system than anything else, and the only reason we didn't 

 have complaints from the one state not complaining of the present sys- 

 tem was that this state didn't have any common schools. We found 

 in the southern states that there is a great movement toward having 

 agriculture taught in the public schools. We found in Georgia they had 

 a number of agricultural high schools, and also in Nebraska; but we 

 didn't find any great efficiency in the teaching of agriculture there, anil 

 I might say here that the only places I have ever found it effective are 

 Wisconsin and Canada. Subsequently I met a couple of gentlemen who 



