592 
A PLEA FOR THE COLLECTIVE INVESTIGATION OF 
INDIAN CULICIDI4, WITH SUGGESTIONS AS 
TO MOOT POINTS FOR ENQUIRY, AND A 
PRODROMUS OF SPECIES KNOWN TO © 
on THE AUTHOR. 
By Geo. M. Gires, Lr.-Con., I.M.S. 
(Read before the Bombay Natural History Society on 11th 
December, 1900.) 
Within the last week we have received in India the details of the 
experiments conducted in the London School of Tropical Medicine 
under the direction of Dr. Manson, which conclusively demonstrate 
that malaria can be transmitted to man through the agency of mos- 
quitoes. A number of mosquitoes of the genus Anopheles were allowed 
to bite a patient suffering from tertian ague in Italy. They were then 
transported to Hingland and made to bite two healthy young English 
students. Both these gentlemen developed tertian malarial fever, 
and the characteristic parasites of the disease were found in their blood. 
I can see in this experiment no possible source of falacy. It is 
absolutely conclusive of the fact that this is at the very least one of 
the methods of the transmission and propagation of the disease; and 
a very little consideration will shew any one conversant with the data 
of parasitism that it is also necessarily the only one, saving only by 
the intravenous injection of the blood of a patient suffering from mala- 
ria into the vessels of a healthy subject, a method Homclly ae - 
occur in nature. 
The reason for our assurance of thie is that the rnalenrial ean 
requires two successive hosts—a human being and a mosquito—to attain 
sexual maturity and propagation, In the blood of the fever patient it 
multiplies non-sexually ; in the tissues of the mosquito it does so sexu- 
ally. Now there are a large number of parasites which have an exactly 
parallel history, the most familiar being that of the tape-worm, which 
lives and multiplies asexually in Herbcvora and other eaten animals, 
and passes its sexually mature life in the Carnivora, and other animal- 
eating animals. Just as it is possible to introduce an asexually multiply- 
ing malarial protozoon mechanically into the veins of a healthy man, so 
would it, doubtless, be practicable in these days of abdominal surgery to 
lay open the intestine and introduce into it a living tape-worm, which 
