4 SCIENCE FROM AN EASY CHAIR 



is two years since yellow fever disappeared from the entire 

 zone, including the two towns. Malaria has not been so 

 completely destroyed. The employes of the Canal Com- 

 mission and Panama Railway now number 45,000. The 

 death-rate of this entire force, including both black 

 (33,000) and white (12,000) employes, was, in the month 

 of December 1907 only 18 per 1000 per annum less 

 than that of the city of Liverpool, which was 20, or that of 

 Salford, which was over 19. Of all the white employe's 

 the death-rate was only 13 per 1000 per annum. In the 

 year 1906 (whole year), among the 6000 white employe's 

 who had come from the United States, including some 

 1 200 women and children, their families, the death-rate 

 from disease was only 4 per 1000. Pneumonia has been 

 a chief cause of death among the negro labourers, but 

 seldom affects the whites. Malaria caused, in the whole 

 army of labourers, only six deaths in December 1907, as 

 against thirteen in the smaller army at work in the same 

 month in 1906. There were 800 cases of malaria in the 

 whole army of 45,000 employe's in December 1907. 



It is thus apparent that Colonel Gorgas has converted 

 this deadly zone from which negroes and white men 

 hurried in a panic of fear twenty years ago into a region 

 as healthy that is to say, with as low a death-rate as 

 an ordinary North American or English city. No doubt 

 allowance must be made in the comparison for the special 

 nature of the population brought together on the canal 

 zone. This is favourable to a low death-rate, in so far as 

 it consists of strong adults, excluding old people and very 

 young children, but unfavourable in so far as it consists of 

 negroes and mean whites, who are even less amenable to 

 sanitary regulations and precautions than the population 

 of an English city. Colonel Gorgas writes that now that 

 it is shown that any population coming into the tropics 

 can protect itself against yellow fever and malaria by 



