WHOLE VOL. APPLIED ENTOMOLOGY HOWARD 479 



(the plates do not appear in the Public Health volume). That paper 

 brought the subject down to 1920, and it is comparatively easy to 

 trace the subsequent advances and discoveries with the aid of several 

 very competent review journals, especially the Review of Applied 

 Entomology, Series B, Medical and Veterinary (London), and the 

 Tropical Diseases Bulletin (London). 



There is, however, one thing that I might touch upon to advan- 

 tage since it fits in somewhat with personal experience. In September, 

 1927, I paid a visit to Sir Ronald Ross in England. He had been very 

 ill (a stroke of some kind), but was very talkative and interesting. 

 He vigorously inveighed against Grassi and his claim of originality 

 in the discovery of the carriage of human malaria by Anopheles. As 

 is happens, Grassi had talked to me with equal vigor in support of his 

 claim, the last time I saw him in Rome, in 1925. Possibly there will 

 always be followers of Grassi, but it seems to me that the Ross 

 claim is perfectly just and that the Nobel Prize Committee was 

 entirely sound when it awarded the prize to Ross. The story 

 has quite recently been told in a very definite way by Dr. G. Car- 

 michael Low in his presidential address before the Royal Society 

 of Tropical Medicine on October 18, 1929 (see The Lancet, No- 

 vember 2, 1929, page 927). Tl^e review in The Lancet relates 

 to that part of Doctor Low's address that deals with Sir Patrick 

 Manson, but includes a long section on " Malaria and Mosquitoes." 

 It seems that Ross had studied malaria in Bangalore in 1889 

 but had failed to confirm Laveran's discovery of the malaria para- 

 sites. In 1894, visiting Manson, he was shown the parasite. In Au- 

 gust, 1897, Ross, in Secunderabad, found, in the stomachs of " spotted- 

 winged mosquitoes " bred from larvae and fed on a patient with 

 malaria crescents in the blood, certain cells containing pigment gran- 

 ules indistinguishable from those seen in malaria parasites ; and a 

 month later he found such cells in another species of Anopheles — 

 also bred from larvae and fed on malarial blood. Very unfortunately, 

 Ross was then sent to another part of India, but in January of 1898, 

 by Manson's intercession, he was sent to Calcutta to continue his 

 malaria research.^ Human malaria was rare in Calcutta ; so he turned 

 to the malaria of birds, and found plenty of material. He then 

 traced the cycle of the parasite's development in a Culex mosquito, 



^ Manson wrote Ross July 3, 1899, tlie following significant words : " Many 

 thanks for the generous way you have recognized my small part in the malaria 

 business. It is more than I deserved. My only claim is that in a measure 

 I discovered you." (See Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, February 

 I, 1930, p. 3«). 



