220 THE COMPLETE SHOT 



not good for fish in the winter when it forms a lake, nor for 

 grouse in the summer when its islets of stunted heather become 

 dry hillocks surrounded by death-traps for little grouse, not only 

 because of their inability to get from one tussock to another 

 without swimming, but probably also because of the millions 

 of insects they breed. The midge flies swarm when these 

 places are wet, and possibly carry grouse disease in their 

 bites from diseased grouse to the healthy, which thereby 

 become diseased. Probably few grouse chicks are drowned 

 in such places, because the old birds instinctively avoid them 

 for nesting. But neither they nor their chicks can avoid the 

 midges, and, as the author pointed out some years ago, in an 

 article in the Fortnightly Review, if Dr. Klein's investigation 

 of the disease did really result in the discovery of the true 

 cause of it, namely the bacilli he cultivated from diseased 

 grouse, then everything else he did pointed to the conclusion 

 that only by direct injection under the skin could grouse disease 

 be given from one creature to another, except in close confine- 

 ment, as when birds healthy and diseased were confined 

 together under one cloth and in a room. Since the writing 

 of that article the Grouse Committee has been appointed, and 

 Mr. Rimington Wilson, who is upon it, has been good enough 

 to inform the author that one of the points being investigated 

 is the midge theory. 



A great many people think that the Committee will do no 

 good, but surely in the present state of science it is only a 

 question of money. Probably critics mean that if the bacilli 

 of the disease is discovered, or re-discovered, we shall be no 

 more forward, as the way to exterminate them or their possible 

 hosts will still have to be inquired into. But if it should be 

 discovered that the midges can convey the disease, and that 

 is an extremely easy thing to test, then we need not bother 

 about the life history of the interesting bacilli, but start and 

 drain the breeding-places of their intermediate hosts the midge 

 flies. This would have one advantage outside all consideration 

 of disease, for it would add possibly one-third to the productive 

 area of the average Highland moor. Probably Mr. Rimington 



