WHOLE VOL. APPLIED ENTOMOLOGY HOWARD 467 



The work at Liverpool was greatly facilitated by the employment of 

 Robert Newstead as professor of entomology. That at Hamburg was 

 strengthened by the addition of Dr. Erich Martini, a medical man 

 trained in entomology, to the research staff. There was early estab- 

 lished in Rio de Janerio the Oswaldo Cruz Institute, where two trained 

 entomologists. Dr. Adolfo Lutz and Dr. Arturo Neiva, have been 

 working. Departments of medical entomology have been established in 

 several American colleges, notably at Harvard, at Cornell University, 

 at the University of California, and at the University of Minnesota. 

 Books have been written, jjeriodicals have been started, and the 

 enormous and promising field is rapidly being exploited. The effect 

 of the discoveries on public health is very apparent. Thousands upon 

 thousands of lives have already been saved as their result. The 

 intensity of many great scourges has been relieved. One of them, 

 yellow fever, has measurably become a thing of the past. The work 

 in this direction regarding the Tropics has shown that tropical coun- 

 tries may be inhabited safely by the white race, and what that means 

 for the future of the world no one can now estimate. All over the 

 United States even — a country which is, fortunately, for the most 

 part situated in the healthiest of climates — life on the average is 

 longer and happier because of the knowledge that has been gained 

 regarding insect-borne diseases. 



But this book is historical. The history of medical entomology has 

 been treated more or less fully in a number of different text-books 

 and general volumes that have been published. The writer in 192 1 

 wrote "A Fif ty-Year Sketch History of Medical Entomology " which 

 was published in the Jubilee Volume of the American Public Health 

 Association and reprinted, with some change, in the Smithsonian 

 Report for 1921. So the main features of the history of the subject 

 (which after all is so recent) have been covered in an accessible way. 



It will possibly be of interest, however, to add some facts from the 

 personal experiences of the writer. 



Having had more or less of a medical education and being, there- 

 fore, interested in medical subjects, this new development of ento- 

 mology naturally appealed to me. And then chance led to the study 

 of mosquitoes, house flies, and fleas in the preparation of a work on 

 household insects in 1895 and 1896 before any of these insects had 

 been implicated in the carriage of disease. In fact, mosquito remedies 

 had been studied by us even before this. I had used kerosene in a 

 water trough when a boy at Ithaca as early as 1867, and in the summer 

 of 1892 conducted a series of careful experiments in the use of kero- 

 sene on a mosquito-breeding pond, determining the spread qualities 



