BIOLOGY IN ITS WIDER ASPECTS 1283 



On one column (with three hnes of large capital headings, evidencing 

 a sub-editorial recognition of importance), we read The Menace 

 OF Malaria — Ross Institute's Fighting Programme — Control 

 Measures — followed by a brief, but intelligent report of Sir Malcolm 

 Watson's opening discussion at the Ross Institute's Industrial Anti- 

 Malarial Advisory Committee. In this he indicates various practical 

 measures, as for dealing with different types of jungle, streams, 

 etc., and also the need of getting estate doctors, managers and 

 engineers, etc., to come to the Ross Institute when on leave, and 

 learn what can be done to control malaria. And this not only by 

 getting advice, but even in qualified cases with free facilities to use 

 the research laboratories. And he points out how it is only within 

 the last seventy years that malaria has spread in a severe form in 

 Western and Central Bengal ; and Bengal will soon follow the way 

 of Ceylon (of which two-thirds is now uninhabitable on account of 

 malaria) if something be not done soon to control this. 



So far well: here is awakening at last to one of the grave world- 

 crises (and one of the most plainly intelligible causes of "unrest" 

 in such regions). But now pass to the correspondence column of the 

 same paper, with two letters under the heading of "Italy and the 

 Mosquito", and those offering precautions and remedies. "The best 

 remedy I know for a sting is to hold a lighted cigarette as close to 

 the place as possible without scorching the skin. The heat kills the 

 microbes which have been injected by the insect." "Another corre- 

 spondent has suggested that the eating of garlic by Italians may 

 render them immune; but I have always found that after staying 

 in a foreign country you become more or less immune." A following 

 letter offers mild precautions — such as burning a "Fidibus" at 

 bedtime. Does not such well-meaning correspondence bring out the 

 absence of knowledge, even among those who have had personal 

 opportunity ? One of us lately spent most of ten years in India, and in 

 town-planning or teaching was never far from this almost everywhere 

 more or less pressing question; so must mournfully record that — 

 apart from its very few British and Indian specialists really compe- 

 tent — he could find little knowledge, or practical response among 

 governing authorities, British or Indian, for whose city improve- 

 ments he was engaged, and otherwise by no means so disc our agingly. 

 It would seem as if to the traditional education — British or Indian 

 here matters not, since alike without adequate initiation to bio- 

 logical science— there were added that further apathy which has 

 been seen, since Plato's time, to be so commonly associated with 

 that long persistent and deep-lying malarial infection which so few 

 escape. 



Yet malaria is not the only instance: the same preponderant 

 public immunity to biologic science and its teaching persists all 

 round, and in Europe as well as India. When Lister's antiseptic 



