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convict labour, but will be much expedited soon by steam power. 

 Meanwhile kerosene is being used on some of the swamp pools most 

 favoured by the Anopheles. It is an unfortunate fact that the 

 Anopheles is, at least in certain parts of Lagos, the most common 

 mosquito. About 70 per cent, of the many that haunt Government 

 House are Anopheles^ and unhappily they puncture one all day long. 



Many of the water tanks about European quarters are found to 

 contain large numbers of mosquito larva?. A tinsmith has recently 

 been engaged from England whose first duty it will be to make all 

 water tanks mosquito-proof. It appears from many observations that 

 mosquitoes do not breed in the Lagos wells, though they are seldom 

 over 20 feet deep, while many are considerably shallower. Fortu- 

 nately for Lagos the town is built on sand, through which rain pools 

 soon disappear by filtration. But for that accident the place would 

 be simply uninhabitable. 



It is strongly recommended in certain competent quarters that to 

 get away from infected mosquitoes Europeans should live at places 

 apart from natives. This may be called the academic view. From 

 the administrative point of view it is an unacceptable doctrine. The 

 academic view is ungenerous, and would afford no radical remedy 

 were it practicable, which it is not. The policy followed in Lagos in 

 this as in other matters is to take the natives along with the European 

 on the way leading to improvement. Here they cannot live apart nor 

 work apart, and they should not try to do so. Separation would mean 

 that little, or at least less, would be done for the native, and the 

 admitted source of infection would remain perennial. To simply 

 protect the European from fever here would never make Lagos the 

 great commercial port that it should become. What we can do in 

 this matter for the uneducated part of the Lagos population will be 

 effected chiefly by reclaiming swamps and administering quinine. 



It is a fact that has been impressed on myself in a marked manner 

 during the last few weeks that mosquitoes are much more numerous 

 about European quarters than about native dwellings. Up country 

 there are not a few mosquitoes at every European quarter we put up, 

 while at many native camps there were none. The reason of the 

 difference seems to consist in the tanks and other receptacles for 

 water, and in the greater frequency of pools about the quarters of 

 Europeans, one of the results of greater cleanliness. In the interior, 

 speaking generally, the two places at which mosquitoes most abound 

 are European quarters and the tops of the hills, the two localities at 



