452 SANITARY ENTOMOLOGY 



from doing it. They are from the earliest childhood accustomed to the 

 presence of these insects, and after being prevented from disturbing them 

 during the early months of life they do not seem to mind them. 



As a result of this condition of things, eye diseases are very prev- 

 alent in Egypt. I should not think there could be any place in the 

 world where bad eyes are so often seen as in Egypt. The natives are often 

 short-sighted. For instance, very few of them can read their newspapers 

 without bringing them up to two or three inches of their eyes and then it 

 is obvious that only one eye is used in reading. It is a curious sight to 

 see these people reading in the trains and other public places. 



This condition is probably the result of some form of ophthalmia and 

 is quite different from the one-eyed condition so often seen in Egypt in 

 consequence of wilful mutilation of an eye for the purpose of evading 

 military conscription or the payment of the small sum required to pur- 

 chase exemption. 



THE sultan's funeral 



On the day of the funeral of the late Sultan, His Highness, Hussein 

 Kamil Pasha, in October, 1917, a party of us gained admission to a 

 balcony overlooking the street in the business part of Cairo. When we 

 arrived, there were a number of people already there. They seemed to 

 be Italians or perhaps Syrians, we couldn't tell. They spoke French. 



Among them were a number of children, six or seven in number, 

 the eldest being about 16 or 17 years and the youngest some 7 or 8 years 

 of age. After a time I noticed in the hair of the eldest, a girl of the bru- 

 nette type with very dark hair, a whitish streak across the side of the 

 head from near the forehead well back to where the hair was gathered into 

 the long braid which hung down her back. This white streak must have 

 been about an inch and a half to two inches in width and some five or six 

 inches long. I saw that the whitish appearance was due to the presence of 

 masses of nits of the head louse. I then noticed the heads of the other 

 children there and found that they were all the same. Every head was 

 full of nits. 



I actually saw the lice crawling about in the hair of these children, 

 and though I watched them pretty constantly for about two hours, 

 except for a few minutes when some parts of the funeral procession were 

 passing, I did not once see anyone of them attempt to scratch or in any 

 way take notice of the irritation which must have been caused by the lice. 



The general appearance of these children was one of a fair degree 

 of neatness and cleanliness, and yet they were so inured to the attacks 

 of these parasites that they paid not the slightest attention to them. 

 I have never seen anywhere such a heavy infestation of these vermin. 



