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JOURNAL, R.A.S. (CEYLON). 



[Vol. XIX. 



Britain and Ireland for January last.* Then there has recently 

 been started a " Social Reform Society," with a Quarterly 

 Journal; and, again, we have an Engineering Association 

 of Ceylon just started, for which a career of usefulness may well be 

 anticipated. Its "transactions" from time to time with plans 

 and designs are sure to be of practical value. In respect of 

 electrical developments alone there is great scope in Ceylon with 

 so much water power running — may we say to waste — in our hill and 

 even low-country. " Hitch your wagon to a star" said the 

 American philosopher Emerson, and some approach may be said 

 to have been made of late towards putting that counsel into 

 practice. It has been well said that " our railway trains are 

 dragged by the sunbeams that were bottled in the coal measureless 

 ages ago." Now our high roads are occupied by bicycles, cars, 

 and wagons propelled by the same force. We have electric 

 tramways and electric lighting, although our electricity, like 

 steam, is as yet in Ceylon almost entirely the product of coal. 

 It is for our engineers to show what can be done through the 



° S USR UTA ON MOSQ UITOES. 



His Excellency Sir Henry A. Blake, Governor of Ceylon, having 

 most kindly favoured me with a copy of his Paper on " Ancient Theories 

 of Causation of Fever by Mosquitoes " [read before the Ceylon 

 Branch of the British Medical Association on the 15th April, 1905], 

 I have once more examined all the principal medical Sanskrit texts 

 likely to throw light on this point. The two texts of Susruta, on 

 which the five distinguished Ceylon scholars referred to by Sir Henry 

 Blake have rested their opinion that the medical writers of ancient 

 India were acquainted with the connection existing between malaria 

 and mosquitoes, were also quoted in my previous communication to 

 this Journal (July, 1905), which was written about the same time as 

 Sir H. Blake's Paper. Now it is quite true that the two texts, the 

 only ones in Susruta which bear on the point, may convey the 

 impression that he was actually aware of the fatal consequences 

 attending the bites of certain mosquitoes, of the kind called Para- 

 vatiya (mountainous), which are, he says, as dangerous as " life- 

 taking " or destructive insects. The " life-taking " insects, accord- 

 ing to Susruta, are of twelve kinds, Tunginasa, &c. (not identified), 

 and they cause the person bitten to undergo the same (seven con- 

 secutive stages of) symptoms as in the case of snake-bites, as well as 

 the painful sensations (of pricking pain, heat, itching, and so on, 

 Comm.) and dangerous diseases, the bite, as if burnt with caustic 

 or fire, being red, yellow, white, or brown. The further symptoms 

 which are mentioned in the following verses, such as fever, pain in the 

 limbs, &c, are, however, common to all the four principal kinds of 

 insect bites ; they are not meant to be specially characteristic of the 

 bites of " life- taking " insects. [This does not come out in the English 

 translation proposed by the five Sanskrit scholars. It appears from 

 the Sanskrit Commentary of Dallana.] Nor is the fever (jvara) of which 

 Susruta speaks in this place likely to be true malarial fever. The 

 term rather denotes the wound fever, which is constantly mentioned 

 by Susruta as arising from the bites of insects, such as Visvambharas 

 and Kandumakas [Kalpasth (viii., 15), of various poisonous spiders 

 (viii., 51-54), of scorpions (viii., 35), of certain serpents (iv., 24), of rats 



