354 TSETSE FLIES 



depopulated certain game areas wherein these 

 insects were well established. In its terrible 

 march through the country this disease did not 

 depopulate every portion of it ; many small 

 areas were entirely untouched, and it is the 

 descendants of the fortunate dwellers therein who 

 are now slowly restocking the country. In 

 Nyasaland, for example, the destruction wrought 

 by the rinderpest upon animal life in no way, 

 district for district, affected the previous presence 

 of the tsetse. They were there before the 

 rinderpest, when doubtless they waxed fat upon 

 the blood of the multitudinous mammals the 

 country contains, but the destruction of the 

 game affected them not a whit — ^there they con- 

 tinued. When I was in Nyasaland in 1911, I 

 found the inhabitants, most of whom to me were 

 more or less new-comers, almost panic-stricken 

 because, as they stated, tsetse flies were now 

 appearing in new and previously unvisited locali- 

 ties ; but, as I reminded them, that is one of the 

 peculiarities regarding the insect for which science 

 is unable, in spite of commissions, and experts, 

 and men possessed of special knowledge, to afford 

 us any explanation. If they come they come, 

 and means may be devised to rid the country of 

 them, but the fact of their having chosen, as in 

 these cases, portions of the Nyasaland districts 

 where game is decidedly scarce, would not appear 

 to hold out much hope of success to Dr. Warring- 

 ton Yorke's scheme of getting rid of the tsetse 

 fly by " driving the animals back." 



Personally, I feel convinced that the tsetse 



