Makch 9, 1906.] 



SCIENCE. 



373 



city house-to-house inspections were made 

 to some extent, and this work was largely 

 instrumental in forcing the report of cases 

 which, otherwise, might never have been 

 reported and might have served as seed for 

 a future distribution of the disease. 



8. With a view to the general elimina- 

 tion of the mosquito, we salted 750 miles 

 of street gutters, using some 3,000,000 

 pounds of rock salt to form a minimum 

 solution of five per cent., and in so doing 

 incidentally cut the malaria rate down to 

 almost nil. 



9. One of the most serious problems of 

 yellow fever has ever been, and was this 

 year, that of transportation. In order to 

 satisfy public clamor, we disinfected cars, 

 both passenger and freight. "We relayed 

 passenger coaches and cut out Pullman 

 traffic, so far as direct entry into the city 

 was concerned. 



10. I am strongly of the opinion that 

 most of this car disinfection and relaying 

 was unnecessary, and in support of that 

 view I wish to call attention to the fact 

 that, having an abiding faith in the ideas 

 which I shall hereafter state, I purposely 

 omitted any relay or disinfection of the 

 Louisville & ISTashville coaches out of New 

 Orleans, going to the Alabama state line, 

 where they were relayed. These coaches 

 went from the city of New Orleans, tra- 

 versing the entire width of eastern Louisi- 

 ana and southern Mississippi, a distance of 

 116 miles, every day and every night, with- 

 out any precautions whatever being taken 

 until some weeks after the beginning of 

 the outbreak, and then the windows were 

 screened. 



These cars were boarded by Mississippi 

 National Guardsmen who served as quaran- 

 tine guards, and who traveled in the cars 

 with the passengers, from the western to 

 the eastern border of the state of Missis- 

 sippi and back again, day and night, in 

 dry and in humid weather, for the whole 



period during which yellow fever existed 

 in New Orleans. There were some score 

 of them so exposed to any infection which 

 might have existed in these coaches, but 

 not a single one of those men so acting as 

 train inspectors, nor any of the train crews, 

 was taken sick with any kind of fever what- 

 soever, and I wish, in concluding this par- 

 ticular portion of my remarks, to accen- 

 tuate the fact that these coaches traveled 

 up and down Elysian Fields street in the 

 city of New Orleans, on both sides of which 

 street the infection was rampant, as well 

 as up and down the river front of the city, 

 passing the original infected area where 

 the infection was most prevalent, thus de- 

 termining, at least to my mind, as strongly 

 as circumstantial evidence may determine 

 anything, that the infected stegomyia does 

 not travel to any noticeable degree; that 

 she remahis, as nearly as she may, at the 

 place ivhere she first tastes blood, and will 

 not voluntarily leave a house, much less 

 cross a street. 



11. The case in which she can not find 

 food, water and seclusion in the habitat 

 she chooses at her birth is rare indeed, and 

 finding these, she needs no more. 



She can not abide the glare of a mid- 

 day sun, as shown by Berry, of the Public 

 Health and Marine Hospital Service, who 

 found this species killed by two minutes' 

 exposure to a noon sun, in Texas, in 1903. 



We must not attempt to reason from 

 analogy with other species, and be led into 

 error because others do travel. The Stego- 

 myia is a domesticated species and may be 

 justly likened to the quiet German peasant, 

 while the Culex solicitans, like a wandering 

 Bedouin, rises from her native marsh and 

 willingly drifts with the wind. Unlike the 

 Stegomyia, she has no home and wants 

 none. She is not choice as to her meal of 

 blood — any old hide will answer the pur- 

 pose. 



The rarity with which the stegomyia 



