348 ANTSrUAL REPORT SMITHSOIOAN INSTITUTION,, 1942 



to the official history "malaria dominated the medical and military 

 situation." This medical disaster had come from two anopheles, A. 

 macuUpermis in the swamps, and A. superpictus in the hills, and a 

 failure to control them. A. superpictus I had already seen in Albania 

 and south Serbia. It breeds among stones in slowly moving hill 

 streams. Its distribution is extensive. It has been mentioned in 

 Spain and north Italy. But it is the great carrier in Sicily, Dalmatia, 

 Yugoslavia, Albania, Macedonia, Greece, Bulgaria, Thrace, Anatolia, 

 Cyprus, Caucasus, Transcaucasus, Cilicia, Syria, Palestine, Sinai, 

 Upper Mesopotamia, Turkoman Republic (Transcaspia), Cossack 

 Republic (Tashkent) , Bokhara, Persia, and northwest India. As we 

 read the names, which I have taken from a book on the anopheles of 

 , India (Christophers, 1933) , we are reminded of the victorious march 

 of Alexander the Great against the Persian King and on to India. 

 You will remember how, when his army refused to go farther, he 

 sailed down the Indus and up the Persian Gulf, and how he died at 

 Babylon. 



The exploration of the waterways round about the empire was Alexander's 

 immediate concern, the discovery of the presumed connection of the Caspian 

 with the Northern Ocean, the opening of a maritime route from Babylon to 

 Egypt round Arabia. The latter enterprise Alexander designed to conduct in 

 person ; under his supervision was prepared in Babylon an immense fleet, a great 

 basin dug out to contain one thousand ships, and the water communications of 

 Babylon taken in hand. (Encyl. Brit, 14th ed., p. 570.) 



The excavation of earth and the aggregation of laborers are notori- 

 ous antecedents of an outbreak of malaria ; for the excavations create 

 mosquito-breeding places and the laborers supply the malaria para- 

 sites. By then it was the month of June, when malaria, as we found 

 in the last war (Christophers, 1921) is in full blast. So we are not 

 surprised to read: 



At last all was ready ; the 20th of the month Daesius (? June 5) was fixed for 

 the king's setting forth. On the 15th and 16th Alexander caroused deep into the 

 night at the house of the favourite Medius. On the 17th he developed fever ; for 

 a time he treated it as a momentary impediment to the expedition ; on the 27th 

 his speech was gone, and the Macedonian army was suffered to pass, man by man, 

 through his chamber to bid him farewell. On the 28th (June 13) Alexander 

 died. (Encycl. Brit., 14th ed., p. 570.) 



The fever may have been typhoid; but it all suggests malaria. 

 Quinine w^as unknown to the Greeks. If it were malaria, the species 

 that infected and killed the victor of so many fights would probably 

 be, not A. superpictics, which is confined to the submontane regions of 

 Mesopotamia, but A. stephensi. This is the mosquito which Ross 

 thinks was the one he first infected with malaria in his little labora- 

 tory at Secunclerabad in India. 



