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scientists have accomplished and which are well known to you; they shall 

 undoubtedly be recorded in the annals of science as an event of the 

 highest importance. But any one who chooses to look into the matter can 

 easily satisfy himself that my own work in that field has been singularly 

 misrepresented before the American public. I have written many articles 

 for Cuban and foreign publications and for different congresses, informing 

 the readers of each successive step in my investigations; some of them 

 having been translated from the Spanish (among them my first Memoir on 

 the mosquito, of 1881), so that it cannot be alleged that I have kept my 

 findings to myself. Whoever takes the trouble of reading them will find 

 abundant evidence that among the facts and conjectures which are 

 attributed to the recent investigators there is scarcely one which had not 

 been asserted, demonstrated, or suggested by me, as the result of my 

 personal experiments and observations. As to my inferences, I had even, 

 taken into consideration, sixteen years ago, the possibility that the 

 mosquito might constitute an "intermediary host" necessary for 

 the evolution of some phase of development in the germ of the disease 

 (see my paper in the American Journal of the Medical Sciences, October, 

 1886, p. 402). My ideas, however did not incline me to believe that 

 the yellow fever germ was an animal parasite, there being at that 

 time no precedent of an acute infectious disease produced by an animal 

 germ; for Laveran's Plasmodium had not yet received the general 

 recognition which it deserved. Neither, in referring to an "intermediate 

 host," was I thinking of Manson's theory about the transmission of the 

 filaría by mosquitoes, for I regret to say, I had found it difficult to 

 reconcile that theory with my own investigations in Havana, where 

 apparently the right kind of Culex is not very prevalent. So far as I can 

 remember, what first suggested to my mind the idea that the Culex 

 mosquito might be the intermediary host of the yellow fever germ was an 

 account published in Van Tieghem's Botanique (p. 1035, ed. 1884) of the 

 life-cycle of the Puccinia graminis, in which I was much interested. That 

 species of puccinia is a very destructive parasitic fungus which attacks the 

 corn and, and is very much dreaded by the French agriculturist, on, 

 account of the damage which it causes in the corn during the 

 summer season, forming in autumm peculiar winter-spores which 

 remain attached to the dead plant through the winter; in the spring 

 those spores produce light sporidia which are disseminated by the wind, 

 but which will only germinate upon a particular plant, the Epine vinette 

 (Berberís vulgaris); the parasite now develops under a new, almost 

 unrecognizable, form, producing another kind of spores, which in their 

 turn will only germinate upon the cornplant. Van Tieghem points out the 

 practical use to which this knowledge of the life-cycle of the parasite has 

 been put, since by keeping the corn-fields free from Epine vinette the puc- 

 cinia is prevented from returning upon the corn-plant. 



