REVIEWS. G49 



MEDICAL ENTOMOLOGY. 



Eatomolof/ij foi' Medical Officers: By A. Alcock, C.I.E., M.B., LL.D., F.R.S., 

 etc., Lecturer on Medical Entomology, etc., at the London School of 

 Tropical Medicine. Lately Superintendent of the Indian Museum, 

 and Professor of Zoology in the Medical College of Bengal. Sometime 

 Surgeon-Naturalist to the Indian Marine Survey. London, Messrs. 

 Gurney and Jackson, 1911, Price 9 shillings net. 

 The publication by Colonel Alcock of an Entomological Text-book will 

 come as a surprise to those who know him as one of the leading authorities 

 ■on the abyssal fauna, but it cannot be said that the admirable work before 

 us has suffered in being written by one who is a naturalist in the true 

 sense of the word, not merely a specialist in the narrow sense. For some 

 years past Colonel Alcock has been occupied in organizing and conducting 

 in the Seamen's Hospital at the Royal Albert Docks a course of medical 

 entomology for doctors, missionaries and others interested in tropical 

 medicine. His " Entomology for Medical Officers " is therefore the result 

 not merely of theoretical knowledge but of practical experience. Perhaps 

 the most striking feature of the book is its remarkable lucidity. It is not 

 an easy task to give students to whom " entomology is a means rather than 

 an end," a precise idea of the classification and structure of those Insects, 

 Arachnids and other Arthropods — for the scope of the work is not limited 

 to the Insects in a limited sense — that are noxious to man's person. That 

 this has been achieved no one who reads "Entomology for Medical Officers " 

 •can doubt. Further, a great simplification has been introduced into the 

 ■classification of the mosquitoes, especially of those which belong, in a wide 

 sense, to the genus Anopheles ; so that we are now within reasonable 

 distance of a complete revision of the Culicidae in which the accumulation 

 of " bad " species and worse genera that the last few years have produced 

 will be swept away and it will again be possible to regard an interesting- 

 family of Insects not merely as a happy hunting-ground for the species- 

 monger but as a legitimate object of study to the zoologist ; for no scien- 

 tific study of any group of animals can be successful so long as it is 

 viewed from a prejudiced standpoint that encourages the production of 

 hasty work, and in the case of a group of great practical importance it is 

 the ordinary man, not merely the zoologist, who suffers from hasty work 

 such as that recently lavished on the Culicidae. Colonel Alcock is a 

 doctor as well as a zoologist, and it is his good fortune also to be endowed 

 with a literary style of uncommon merit. No better trial of qualifications 

 could be imagined in the production of a text-book on medical zoology, so 

 long as no one of them is allowed to dominate the rest, and in this case 

 the three are united in perfect harmony by experience. The book can be 



