34 



It should be famous, for it has been the cause of the British Board of 

 Agriculture passing the first Vegetation Diseases Act into law, in order to 

 deal with this pest. Notices under tMs Act have been posted up all over 

 the country districts, calling attention to the danger of it spreading, and the 

 means to check it. 



At Watford, at the request of Mr. F. Cooper, I visited his laboratories, 

 and saw his methods of working out the life histories of the different species 

 of cattle ticks, and his apparatus for making micro-photographs from the tick 

 itself. The main laboratories of Messrs. Cooper and Son are at Berkhampstead, 

 but I was unable to accept their kind invitation to visit them. 



I spent two days in Liverpool with Mr. Robert Newstead, who is the 

 best known economic entomologist in England, and is in charge of the 

 very important entomological investigations at the Liverpool Tropical 

 School of Medicine, attached to the Liverpool University. The medical 

 side of entomology was demonstrated a good many 3 ears ago, when it 

 was proved by Professor Grassi in Rome, Major D. Ross in Africa, and 

 several other investigators along the same line*, that mosquitoes had the 

 power, when biting people, of leaving behind in the blood a micro-organism 

 that, multiplying with marvellous rapidity, disorganised the blood to such an 

 extent that it brought about malarial fever. These discoveries opened an 

 immense field of original research ; and it is now proved beyond a doubt that 

 all the malarial fevers and the dreaded yellow fever, that bugbear of the West 

 Indies and South America, are transmitted to man by the bite of mosquitoes. 

 In many cases the exact species of mosquito is known, and within the last 

 ten years thousands of lives have been saved by the practical application of 

 this -knowledge. Sttgomyia fasciata, the yellow fever mosquito, has been 

 carefully studied, and its life history ascertained, so that we know where to 

 look for and destroy it. In the last outbreak in New Orleans, the energetic 

 methods of destroying all stagnant water and fumigating each room stamped 

 out the fever in a very short time. In Cuba the same thing has taken 

 place since the American occupation, and at the Panama Canal, one of the 

 most deadly places in the world twenty-five years ago, the methods of the 

 American engineers have now made it one of the healthiest. One of the 

 important missions of the workers at Liverpool is to discover some means to 

 deal with the " Sleeping Sickness " of Central Africa, caused in a similar 

 manner by the bite of a lar#e blood-sucking fly (Glossina pulpalis), a closely- 

 allied species to the better known " Tsetse Fly," which causes the death of 

 so much stock in many parts of Africa. The organism carried by this fly is 

 known as " Trypanosome" and natives attacked by this disease seldom 

 recover. The disease has been spreading rapidly the last few years, because 

 if a native comes out of an infested area of sickness, with his blood teeming 

 with these micro-organisms, he will transmit the disease to this particular 

 fly if it happens to bite him; while, if in clean district*, not having 

 imbibed infected blood, it would not be able to reproduce the disease. The 

 Government officials in some districts have formed a regular quarantine line, 

 and all natives are carefully examined, and if they show any swelling of the 

 cervical glands (one of the most certain evidences of the disease), they are not 

 allowed beyond their own district. Hundreds of thousands of natives have 

 died in Africa during the last ten years, particularly those living in the low- 

 lying or swampy lands ; and it appears at present as if the survivors of these 

 districts will have to be removed to higher lands away from the fly-haunted 

 swamps, unless some simple method of exterminating the flies can be dis- 

 covered. The whole trade of Central Africa is disorganised by this 



