SCIENCE- GOSSIP. 



*95 



animals will eat wood, gnawing the disselboom, or 

 pole of a waggon, until it becomes too thin to be 

 of use. Of course, the conditions I have men- 

 tioned were only caused by the most urgent neces- 

 sity. The railway line, bridges, and culverts were 

 often blown to pieces, but still supplies and hos- 

 pitals had to come to the front. 



As a rule waggons can proceed across country 

 regardless of roads, except here and there where 

 boulders occur, or in cultivated tracts. Once the 

 soil is turned up the surface is very soft, such as 

 in -'mealie patches," or where Kaffir corn is grown. 

 The whole country appears to be intersected with 

 barbed wire fencing. If this has been put up to 

 keep off lions, it has been most effective. 



Trees are scarce unless cultivated near farms or 

 in towns, where they grow to a large size. At 

 Wanderboom, near Pretoria, there is an immense 

 fig-tree, resembling the banyan tree of India, 

 except that it does not throw out secondary roots 

 from its branches. This tree, I estimate, oovers 

 an area of 5,000 square feet. 



The common house-flies were a terrible pest at 

 Bloemfontein and The Glen. They swarmed on 

 food and irritated the patients in hospital, unless 

 kept away by mosquito-curtains or fans. To some 

 extent we got rid of them from the tents by driving 

 them out at sunset and closing the tent doors, 

 when they settled outside and were in great part 

 killed by the night frost. Small collections of 

 rubbish will rapidly generate enormous numbers of 

 flies in a hot climate. In Pretoria I tested the 

 time required for the eggs of the house-fly and 

 bluebottle-fly to produce the imagines, and I found 

 the period to be under a week. 



Flies doubtless act as potent carriers of disease. 

 Bred in garbage, they become soiled in their 

 primary environment. In their after-existence, by 

 frequenting contaminated areas, diseased men and 

 lower animals, and subsequently alighting on those 

 in possession of health, they spread infection. To 

 counteract this, and for other reasons, I instituted 

 a method of pouring all discharges from diseased, 

 subjects into a boiling solution ; no flies approached 

 the apparatus, as it was free from odour and gave 

 off great heat. The arrangement produced an 

 absolute holocaust of the lower forms of life ; in 

 fact, after two minutes, life of all kinds became 

 extinct. This system, I Have reason to believe, is 

 now used in hospitals in many parts of South 

 Africa, destroying in that country inestimable 

 numbers of those minute specks of living matter, 

 which the inscrutable law of the universe has 

 appointed to perform the function of indiscriminate 

 destruction of human and other life.(') 



Bites from what was locally called the tarantula 

 — a black hairy spider— were not uncommon, and 

 scorpion bites sometimes occurred. I saw two 

 men suffering from small abscesses, each contain- 



(1) Brit. Med. Journal, April 20th, 1901, p. 954. 



ing a larva about half an inch long by a quarter of 

 an inch thick. I believed them to be the larvae of 

 the Oestrus living stonii. The larvae on removal 

 were alive, and the abscesses then gave no further 

 trouble. Reference is made to similar larvae in 

 Cobbold's " Human Parasites," an original larva 

 taken from Dr. Livingstone in South Africa was 

 said to be in the Hunterian Museum. By the 

 kindness of one of the curators I was enabled to 

 see this specimen, which I believe was identical 

 in species with those I have described, although a 

 little smaller. But this was probably due to 

 shrinkage caused by the preserving medium. 



Rats were a great nuisance, occasionally gnaw- 

 ing the hair of persons during sleep. Snakes were 

 few in my experience ; but I found one under the 

 blanket on which a man had been sleeping. 



The ordinary body lice (Pediculus corporis) were 

 frequent in the clothes of soldiers. It is difficult 

 to say how they originated. Residents in the 

 country maintain that the lice eggs are in the 

 veldt and in waggons. I never observed any of 

 the ordinary head lice (Pedicwlus capitis) ; but 

 from wherever the body lice came, they amounted 

 to a perfect scourge. When men were admitted 

 to hospital their clothing was put in store. If 

 infected, as was often the case, as soon as the 

 clothes were cold all the lice in the garments 

 would come to the surface. At this time they 

 could be easily destroyed, but they left their eggs 

 in the innermost folds and creases of the garments 

 so well protected that even boiling was of doubtful 

 utility in destroying them, disintegration of the 

 garments usually preceding that of the eggs. 



Locusts came in swarms, and if they were as 

 frequent in other parts of the country as they were 

 in the portion through which we marched, they must 

 indeed be very numerous in South Africa. I had 

 an idea that they followed our food convoys ; but 

 if they looked for spare biscuits at Paardeberg 

 they were disappointed. One comfort, at all 

 events, is, that a method of destroying them by 

 infecting some individuals with a species of Impusa 

 fungus has been introduced, by which they are 

 rapidly killed. The living ones consume those 

 dead of the fungus disease, and it is thus spread 

 indefinitely. 



Ant-hills are very common on the veldt. They 

 form mounds from about two feet to four feet in 

 height, the diameter of the base being some four 

 or five feet. As far as I could see, they are com- 

 posed of earth mixed with some secretion from the 

 ants. In consistence they are extremely hard, but 

 the wheel of a heavily laden waggon cuts^ through 

 them. I tried to dissect one, and worked with a 

 pickaxe and spade for nearly an hour, but did not 

 get to the foundation, which appears to be deep in 

 the ground. The interior is excavated by tunnels 

 occupied by many old and young ants, with a store 

 of grass stems cut into portions about half an inch 

 long. The young ants are etiolated, while the old 



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