PREFACE TO FIRST EDITION 
In the authors’ experience many medical men 
in the tropics are only deterred from undertaking 
researches in tropical diseases by the impossibility 
of obtaining the necessary knowledge of methods 
apart from personal instruction in some laboratory. 
Numerous works on technique exist, they are, how¬ 
ever, more adapted for work in a laboratory than for 
the conditions under which the average practitioner 
in the tropics must be prepared to conduct his 
researches. As a result of an experience of several 
years, during our work on the Royal Society’s Com¬ 
mission on Malaria, of the difficulties that Indian and 
Colonial medical officers experience in making the 
first start in what must often be work of the greatest 
interest to themselves and the utmost value to science, 
we have deemed it wise to give instead of full and 
elaborate technique, as usually given, only that which 
we have found the best, the simplest, and the most 
generaly useful. In reality, the necessary methods 
required to undertake research of the highest value 
in Malaria are very simple, yet most of these cannot 
be found in books, and they are with considerable 
difficulty learnt except by the personal direction of 
those who are familiar with the small details which 
go to make success. 
In the present handbook we propose to give the 
essentially practical methods, by which those not 
familiar with laboratory methods may, under their 
own microscopes, follow all the most recent work on 
