216 



the temperature was slightly lower than in the greenhouse. On 23rd 

 June 1915, the contents of the jars were examined. No parasites or 

 fungi were present, but the pupae were completely dried up. The 

 results indicate that the house-fly cannot readily hibernate as a pupa, 

 although it can emerge until the middle of winter. It would seem 

 that the appearance of seemingly freshly-emerged adults during late 

 winter and early spring should be accounted for in some other way. 



EiLEY (W. A.) & JoHANNSEN (C. A.). Handbook of Medical Entomo- 

 logy, Ithaca, N.Y.: Comstock Publishing Co., 1915, 318 pp., 

 174 figs. Price $2. 



This book is described in the preface as the outgrowth of a course 

 of lectures given by the senior author in the Department of Entomology 

 of Cornell University, during the past 6 years, and more specifically, 

 it is an illustrated revision of " Notes on the Relation of Insects to 

 Disease" published in January 1912. It has the defects of almost 

 all books prepared in this way in tKat the reader does not always find 

 the information he requires in the place in which it might be expected. 

 The first chapter on Arthropods which are directly poisonous is a 

 useful feature in the book as an assemblage of facts which must 

 other\^ise be searched for in isolated papers and monographs, and 

 some of the illustrations to this chapter from the late Dr. Slingerland's 

 photographs are particularly good. This cannot be said of many figures 

 of insects in the body of the book, which are too diagramatic to be 

 of any value for the purposes of identification ; some of the 

 illustrations of the eruptions produced by .-icarids might well have 

 been omitted ; they are not good in themselves and are much too 

 small to be of any value for diagnostic purposes. The authors perhaps 

 naturally deal with insect-borne diseases rather from the American 

 than the old world point of view, and pressure of space is probably 

 the reason for this. Surely, however, Bruce is entitled to some of the 

 credit for the idea that the specific trypanosome of sleeping sickness 

 is carried by Ghssina palpalis, but the reader, who is not aware of 

 Bruce's share in the discovery, would not gather it from the account 

 given of the disease in this book. Six pages are devoted to the 

 evidence that pellagra is not carried by Simulium, though a little more 

 space might usefully have been given to Plilehotomus, the fevers caused 

 by its bite, and especially the distribution of these insects. Dr. King's 

 reasons (published in 1883) for believing that the mosquito was 

 probably the carrier of malaria are given at length. Knab's warning 

 that every blood-sucking insect is now suspected as a possible disease 

 carrier and that insufficient thought has been given to the conditions 

 and characteristics of the individual species which make disease 

 transmission possible, is quoted in conclusion. A synoptic key to the 

 Arthropods known or believed to be noxious to man is given and a 

 bibliography is added of recent works on the subject covering 13 pages, 

 which, in the preface, is admitted to be incomplete. Anything 

 approaching a complete bibliography of such a subject would be 

 almost impossible of compilation, but, in this case, it is not by 

 any means so nearly up to the date of publication as it might have 

 been ; possibly the remark in the preface that the enormous 

 literature of isolated articles is to be found principally in foreign 



