XIII. 



THE MALARIA MIDDLEMAN. 



HTHE mosquito has fallen upon evil days. Time was 

 when man was its best friend. In the unscientific 

 period of the nineteenth century men provided free meals for 

 the little insect, and made, in every available place, nur- 

 series of water in which the baby anopheles could disport 

 themselves to their heart's content. Those were indeed 

 halcyon days for the mosquito. They have departed, no 

 more to return. Tempora mutantur et nos mutamur in illis. 

 Science, one day, pointed her finger at the mosquito ; she 

 indicated him as the carrier of malaria. That was the 

 crisis in his history. Those who had before regarded him 

 with easy indifference suddenly became his ruthless ene- 

 mies. And now fierce is the war which the votaries of 

 science are waging against the anopheles a war of extermi- 

 nation. In some parts of the world theirs is already the 

 victory. It is said that the mosquito population of Havana 

 has been reduced by more than 90 per cent, owing to the 

 exertions of the sanitary authorities. 



Recent research, however, has shown that there are mos- 

 quitos and mosquitos. All are not conveyors of malaria ; 

 some carry worse things. Culex, for instance, does not 

 take any part in the dissemination of the malaria organism ; 

 it finds its work cut out in carrying from person to person 

 yellow fever and other horrible diseases. These latter, 

 however, are not among the ills to which flesh is heir in 

 India ; hence we Anglo-Indians look upon the culex as a 

 comparatively harmless creature. Our bete noir is the 

 nasty anopheles, who sucks our blood and in return injects 

 the malaria germs into us. The real cause of malarial fever 



