HISTORY 3 



" Mr. Robert Gladstone and Mr. Jones have 

 kindly called my attention to several passages refer- 

 ring to mosquito nets, called conopeum by the Romans, 

 after the Greeks (our word canopy). Herodotus 

 first noted with surprise the use of them in Egypt ; 

 and they are referred to later in Varro (' De Re 

 Rustica'), Horace ('Epodes'), Propertius, Juvenal, 

 and Paulus Silentiarius ('Anthologa Palatina'). 

 Horace says, ' And among the military standards, 

 oh, shame ! the sun sees a mosquito curtain ' ; and 

 Propertius calls these nets foeda (foul or disgraceful). 

 Evidently, the ancients felt towards them as do many 

 of our own more manly colonists, who prefer annoy- 

 ance, and even sickness, to disgrace. But Paulus 

 Silentiarius thought that they were useful for a post- 

 prandial siesta in order to save the slaves the trouble 

 of using a fly-flapper. Varro said that women lately 

 confined spent a number of days in them ; and 

 Juvenal said that they were used to cover the cradles 

 of the rich and noble." 



If these writers could visit Egypt now, they would 

 still find the mosquito nets in most towns ; though 

 at Ismailia and Port Said this "disgrace" has at 

 last, after all these years, been removed. The fact, 

 recognised by Juvenal, that the poor cannot afford 

 mosquito curtains, explains the greater incidence of 

 fevers among children living in the poverty-stricken 

 quarters of tropical towns. 



It seems probable that the Ancient Greeks, even 

 in the time of Hippocrates (about 460 B.C.), associated 

 marshes with fevers, though the connection of the 



