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13. Organisation and Duties of the Anopheles 

 Gang. The duties of this gang will consist principally 

 in removing all small collections of water on the surface of 

 the ground. Hence the men should be, if possible, road- 

 makers t and well accustomed to the use of the pick and 

 shovel. The head man should be a trained overseer ot 

 navvies ; it will be useful if he is also acquainted with the 

 methods of working cement and concrete. 



In almost all towns, especially in the suburbs and sur- 

 roundings, there are numerous borrow-pits from which 

 earth was formerly taken for building and road-making ; 

 also ditches, old cisterns, gravel-pits, disused wells, water- 

 courses, broken gutters, ponds, and even sometimes small 

 marshes formed by the margins of lakes or by ooze from 

 the soil. In rainy weather these fill up with water, and 

 then often take a long time to dry up again. In temperate 

 climates such places are harmless ; but in warm ones they 

 become a source of danger to the surrounding houses by 

 breeding Anopheles, the malaria-bearing mosquito. 



Besides these, in ill-kept tropical towns, numerous small 

 stagnant puddles form in the public streets. In such towns 

 it is the exception to find well-macadamised streets with 

 pavements and stone gutters ; and the streets are generally 

 nothing but broad pathways, dressed with rubble in the 

 middle for the wheeled traffic, but drained only by rude 

 ditches at the margins. Tropical towns cannot as a rule 

 afford highly trained engineers for road-making, and the 

 result is that these roadside ditches are often very badly 

 constructed. One of the principal errors, common both in 

 India and Africa, is that the ditches are often much too 

 large for the amount of the water they have to carry off. 

 Where a small gutter would have sufficed, we often find a 



