54 



NATURE 



[December 14, 1899 



That certain diseases may arise from the "bites" of 

 insects has been surmised long before the microbial 

 origin of disease was known, many theories were 

 naturally based on insufficient evidence because the key 

 to the riddle had not then been found. In some of the 

 earliest records of epidemics any concurrent phenomena 

 was thought to be the cause, thus the plague at Nimeguen, 

 in Holland, in the seventeenth century, was said to be 

 announced by swarms of insects and meteors. 



All observations are of use, although in the light of 

 present knowledge they may not bear the same interpret- 

 ation as was originally put upon them ; as a suggestion 

 for investigation by experimental methods they may 

 serve a purpose. 



Dr. George H. F. Nuttall in this monograph has been 

 at great pains to collect observations on the point from 

 all sources, and has supplemented these with some 

 experimental researches of his own. 



Insects— using the term in its popular sense — may play 

 a passive role in the propagation of disease. It is 

 obvious that flies, for instance, after soiling their bodies 

 in contaminated matter, may afterwards infect articles of 

 food, especially milk ; and no doubt many cases of typhoid 

 fever are caused in this way. In India, where typhoid 

 fever attacks so many of our troops, the refuse matter is 

 placed outside the camp, and it has been suggested that 

 articles of food in the camp might become infected by 

 dust carried by the wind when it blows from the direction 

 of the refuse matter ; but it is more than likely that 

 flies carried by the wind play a more important part, 

 for they would seek out the food. The same may be 

 said of cholera ; in fact, an instance is given where milk 

 was left out in the open in a jail in India at the time of a 

 -cholera epidemic, and it became infected with the 

 cholera microbe by means of flies, whereas milk left out 

 in another yard where there were no cholera cases and 

 which was separated from the other yard by a high wall 

 did not become infected. 



In playing an active role insects may conceivably cause 

 infection by "biting" after having "bitten" an individual 

 suffering from an infectious disease or after feeding on 

 contaminated substances, for instance, the body of an 

 animal dead of anthrax. Experiments in this direction 

 ■do not seem to have been very successful in the cases of 

 bugs and fleas, which were the insects experimented with ; 

 but it was shown that anthrax and plague microbes do 

 not survive more than a few days at most in the bodies 

 ■of the insects. Even if the "bite" of an infected insect 

 is harmless, it might be otherwise if the insect were 

 crushed on the spot bitten, and the place scratched ; 

 such a procedure might be fraught with danger sup- 

 posing the insect had recently been feeding on infected 

 matter. 



With respect to the tsetse-fly disease in domesticated 

 animals, there is conclusive experimental proof that the 

 fly carries the micro-organism or hjematosine in this 

 case from diseased to healthy animals. 



The filariae, according to Manson, go through changes 

 in the stomach of the mosquito, and finally make their 

 way out into water in which the insects have died, 

 and man becomes infected by drinking the water. In 

 this case and in malaria the insect seems to act as an in- 

 termediary host to man. The mosquito — of which one 

 species, the anopheles, seems to be mostly concerned — • 

 takes up the organism in the blood of the malarious 

 subject, and, according to Manson, mfects soil or water 

 by dying in it ; Ross and others, however, say it infects 

 healthy persons by biting them after biting a malarious 

 patient. 



It is interesting to note that most of our previous 

 •notions as to the localities and time of year that malaria 

 occurs, and the precautions adopted to prevent being 

 attacked still hold good, mutatis mutandis, for the 

 mosquito theory. C. B. S. 



NO. 1572, VOL. 61] 



ETHNOGRAPHICAL MUSEUMS. 



IN Nature of September 14, attention was called to 

 the rapid progress of ethnographical museums in 

 Germany, and to the unsatisfactory state of ethnography 

 in our own country. Since that time two things have 

 happened which confirm the view then taken of the 

 position of our national collections. 



In the first place, one of the distinguished keepers of 

 the Museum fur Volkerkunde in Berlin has recently 

 visited London, and has stated that the enlargement of 

 the museum or its supercession by a completely new build- 

 ing will be seriously considered in the near future. When 

 it is remembered that the Museum fiir Volkerkunde is 

 already so enormously superior to anything which we 

 have in this country, that it stands absolutely in a class 

 by itself, it can easily be guessed that the projected im- 

 provements threaten to leave us in a position of inferiority 

 positively humiliating. For even as matters now stand, 

 the German collections are nearly ten times as good as 

 our own. 



The second occurrence to which we have alluded, is 

 the issue of a report upon European anthropological 

 museums by Mr. George A. Dorsey, of the Field 

 Columbian Museum, who made a tour of the principal 

 European cities in the autumn of last year. Extracts 

 from his report have been published in the form of a 

 short paper in the American Anthropologist for July, 

 1899, and it is therefore accessible to everyone who feels 

 any interest in the subject. 



Mr. Dorsey begins by complaining that the collections 

 illustrating the various branches of anthropology in 

 Europe are all scattered about in different buildings. In 

 London, if you wish to study man as an animal, you must 

 go to the British Museum of Natural History in Cromwell 

 Road, or to the Royal College of Surgeons ; if you wish 

 to study primitive art and industry, you must go to 

 Bloomsbury. In Paris you must wander from the 

 Jardin des Plantes to the Trocadero, and so on in other 

 cities. The great fields of anthropology are nowhere 

 adequately represented in a single building, and the 

 advantages of concentration are lost. 



After this preliminary condemnation, Mr, Dorsey pro- 

 ceeds to discuss several museums in detail. He has a 

 well-merited word of praise for the Pitt-Rivers collection 

 in the University Museum at Oxford, where the develop- 

 ment of different branches of human industry may be 

 studied in a manner impossible anywhere else. Coming 

 to Berlin, he thinks that the Museum fiir Volkerkunde 

 contains the largest amount of ethnographical material to 

 be found in any one museum in the world ; and he is in- 

 clined to believe that it possesses a greater number of 

 specimens than any other two museums combined. The 

 one drawback is that, large as the building is, it has long 

 proved inadequate to the enormous expansion of the col- 

 lections, and is in consequence terribly overcrowded. As 

 we have already seen, this is an inconvenience which 

 will in all probability soon be remedied. 



Of the ethnographical collections in London, our 

 American critic has naturally something to say. After 

 noticing that, from the ethnographical point of view, 

 London, like Paris, is disappointing, he continues : "The 

 large hall [gallery] devoted to this subject in the British 

 Museum is not well adapted to the purpose for which it 

 is used ; it is rather inaccessible, poorly lighted, and does 

 not admit of a ready scientific classification of the objects 

 therein deposited. Naturally, this hall contains many of 

 the rarest and most valuable objects that have ever been 

 obtained by any museum in the world ; but owing to the 

 causes already mentioned, and to the crowding of the 

 cases, it is practically impossible for the visitor in a short 

 time to form any idea of the value of the collection. 

 There are many rare and unique specimens, but the col- 

 lection as a whole cannot be regarded as well illustrating 



