1286 LIFE : OUTLINES OF GENERAL BIOLOGY 



Large and costly hygienic measures like those taken along the 

 Panama Canal belt by the counsels of Sir Ronald Ross, and carried 

 out with admirable practical energy by General Goethals and his 

 staff, would undeniably outrun the Indian budget; yet not the 

 labour-leisure of the Bengal peasantry, once aroused. Meantime, 

 wonders can be done, even by simple cleansing of tank-edges from 

 the weeds needed by the larvae, and by the introduction of little 

 fishes to eat them, though far more than all that is now required, and 

 speedily. So here a further practical suggestion, not so costly as it 

 may at first sight seem. Since the "improved" gas-bombs, already 

 so well-advanced in preparation for the next war, are k:nown to be 

 sufficient to devastate the life of cities, not to say regions, good 

 people in Geneva and elsewhere are now agitating for wholesale 

 provision of gas-masks for civilian communities, no less than for 

 their sons at the front. Be that idea effective or no, such a large 

 proposal justifies a somewhat kindred yet easier protective provision 

 for the speedy abatement of malaria. How so ? As infectious diseases 

 have nowadays to be notified to the public health authority, so 

 should malaria. The patient need not be taken to hospital; for, 

 though it would need time before all homes and individuals can 

 have mosquito curtains, there is little to prevent putting malaria- 

 patients under them, since this would greatly protect the surrounding 

 mosquitoes from becoming infected, and thus carrying the disease 

 to the next persons they bite. This is, of course, no panacea; but 

 only one of the many measures which will have to be adopted as 

 soon as governments, general and local, British and Indian alike, 

 and their public with them, are awakened beyond the routines of 

 taxing and policing, and to the necessity of saving Bengal, Ceylon, 

 and more, from further depopulation and ruin, and towards return 

 to their old and normal health and wealth. 



HUMAN INFLUENCE IN PLANT ECOLOGY.— Since man's ad- 

 vent, he has been wielding influence and gaining power over organic 

 nature, and this increasingly, as in our own times. All this with very 

 mingled results, since so easily for evil, and so difficult for good: 

 witness especially his vast deforestations, as not only for fuel and 

 timber, but as clearings from earliest agriculture onwards, and in our 

 own industrial age. All this we are tardily beginning to see must as 

 far as possible be made good ; as not only in our own islands, but 

 along the Mediterranean, and as far as may be into Asia as well; and 

 so, too, for North America, etc. ; in fact wellnigh for the wide world's 

 coming statesmanship, with its geotechnic policy, its veritable 

 armies for reafforestation. Thus with all appreciation of the autumn 

 beauty of Scotland, with its purple heather and golden bracken over 

 hills and dales, and with the green mosses of its peaty levels, we yet 

 cannot but also see these as weed-wastes, created largely by past 



