WHOLE VOL. APPLIED ENTOMOLOGY HOWARD 471 



This interest in moquitoes naturally brought me into correspon- 

 dence with Ronald Ross. One of his characteristic early letters (dated 

 Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, February 20, 1902) is of 

 sufficient interest to quote : 



I am delighted to hear tliat you like my " Mosquito Brigades." However it 

 is not a patch on your work, which I wish I had got hold of before. I sail for 

 Sierra Leone in two days, and hope to find work progressing. We have forced 

 the Gambia Colony to take up the same work, and by dint of constant driving, 

 I think we are getting this old country to do something at last. It is however 

 doubtless the example of Havana that has chiefly set them going. We never do 

 anything here unless some other country takes it up first. Yes, I think that 

 the Italian School requires a little medicine in the shape of plain speaking. I 

 suppose that you have seen the last effort of Grassi and Noe, who pretend that 

 they have found out about Filaria bancrofti. As a matter of fact they have 

 hardly ever seen one, much less found out anything about them. 



Believe me, 



Yours very sincerely, 



Ronald Ross. 



In the summer of 1904 Ross came to the L nited States to take 

 part in the International Congress of Arts and Sciences which was 

 held luider the auspices of the St. Louis Exposition. I saw a great 

 deal of him at that time, and he seized the opportunity on the trip 

 to visit Panama and look into Gorgas' great sanitary operations. In 

 later years I visited him several times in Liverpool, saw him in 191 2 

 at the 250th anniversary of the founding of the Royal Society, and 

 in 1927 visited him at his home near London. 



Following Ross' work in India, the Rt. Hon. Joseph Chamberlain 

 requested the Royal Society of England to appoint a committee to 

 cooperate with the officials of the Colonial Office in the investiga- 

 tion of the causes of malaria and the possibility of controlling that 

 scourge of tropical lands. Prof. E. Ray Lankester, of the British 

 Museum of Natural History, was appointed a member of the com- 

 mittee, and came to the conclusion that a most important service 

 might be rendered in the preparation of a work describing the mos- 

 quitoes of all parts of the world so as to enable medical men engaged 

 in tracing connection between mosquitoes and human disease to iden- 

 tify and speak with precision of the species implicated. As it hap- 

 pened, the collection of mosquitoes in the British Museum of Natural 

 History was sinall, and the result was that with the help of the 

 Colonial Office, the Foreign Office, and the India Office, circulars 

 were sent out to the colonies, and a very large series of mosquitoes 

 from all parts of the world was secured. The committee then secured 

 the services of Mr. F. V. Theobald, who plunged into the mono- 

 graphic work. It is extraordinary that Mr. Theobald was able to do 



