478 HUNTINGTON— GUATEMALA AND THE [April i8. 



sibility of conceiving that the people who are now intensely inflicted with 

 malaria could "be like the ancient Greeks who did so much for the world ; and 

 I therefore suggested the hypothesis that malaria could only have entered 

 Greece at about the time of the great Persian wars — a hypothesis which has 

 been very carefully studied by Mr. W. H. S. Jones. One can scarcely 

 imagine that the physically fine race and the magnificent athletes figured in 

 Greek sculpture could ever have spent a malarious and spleno-megalous 

 childhood. And converseh', it is difficult to imagine that many of the malari- 

 ous natives in the tropics will ever rise to any great height of civilization 

 while that disease endures amongst them. I am aware that Africa has pro- 

 duced some magnificent races, such as those of the Zulus and the Masai, but 

 I have heard that the countries inhabited by them are not nearly so disease- 

 ridden as many of the larger tracts. At all events whatever may be the 

 effect of a malarious childhood upon the physique of adult life, its effects on 

 the mental development must certainly be very bad, while the disease always 

 paralyses the material prosperity of the country where it exists in an 

 intense form. 



" Consider now the effects of yellow fever, that great disease of tropical 

 America. The Liverpool School sent four investigators to study it, and all 

 these four were attacked within a short time. One died, one was extremely 

 ill, and two suffered severely. The same thing tended to happen to all 

 visitors in those countries. They were almost certain of being attacked by 

 yellow fever, and the chances of death were one to four. Tropical America 

 was therefore scarcely a suitable place for a picnic party! But malaria and 

 yellow fever are only some of the more important tropical diseases. Perhaps 

 the greatest enemy of all is dysentery, which in the old days massacred 

 thousands of white men, and millions of natives in India, America, and all hot 

 countries, and rendered survivors ill for years. Malaria has always been the 

 bane of Africa and India ; the Bilharzia parasite of Egypt ; and we are 

 acquainted with the ravages of kala-azar and sleeping sickness. Apart from 

 these more general or fatal maladies, life tends to be rendered unhealthy by 

 other parasites and by innumerable small maladies, such as dengue and sand- 

 fly fever, filariasis, tropical skin diseases and other maladies, . . . True, we 

 have many maladies in Europe, but in order to compare the two sets of dis- 

 eases we should compare the death-rates. Whereas in England it is a long 

 way below 20 per thousand per annum, throughout the tropics it is nearer 40 

 per thousand. In India alone malaria kills over a million persons a year, and 

 dysentery and malaria kills many hundreds of thousands. I have seen places 

 in which the ordinary death-rate remains at between 50 and 60 per thousand ; 

 others which were so unhealthy that they were being deserted by their 

 inhabitants ; and others, lastly, which were simply uninhabitable. What 

 would people say if such a state of things were to exist in most villages in 

 England, Scotland, and Ireland ?"i 



On the whole it seems safe to say that in tropical countries the 



1 United Empire, February, 1913, pp. 123-124. Sir Ronald Ross, " Medical 

 Science and the Tropics." 



