water front and leaves its imprint in a disease which, if you sur¬ 
vive it, means the loss of 40 days; and only one in ten does 
survive. 
What to do ? Shall we go out with nets and chase the house 
fly! Shall we imitate Colonel Gorgas at Panama and coop our 
people behind screens for fear of insect bites I The remedy is 
simple. Leave the flies alone — merely change their diet. Look to 
the source of their poison — clean up the water fronts. New York 
with its adjoining boroughs represents some 10,000,000 of people, 
all using this Hudson River as its cloaca maxima, or supreme 
sewer. 
There is still another peril in this river pollution. Let me 
illustrate. One fine August day in 1896, it was but a few weeks 
after returning from a trip through South Africa, I started from 
the float of the New York Canoe Club at Bensonhurst, near 
Coney Island, and paddled up the Hudson— curious to study the 
metropolitan water-side at close range. 
I paid heavily for my curiosity — the stench was heavy along 
the pier heads, and the waters of the bay and river were speckled 
with dead fish, to say nothing of slimy stuff which clung to the 
sides of my little boat. At starting I was in excellent health, but 
I reached the Ardsley Club, near Dobbs Ferry, so weak that I 
had to be helped ashore, and for six weeks I lay a victim of the 
fever that floated on the waters I had just traversed. 
The Hudson is a stream once famous for its fisheries—noble 
sporting fish of all kinds, and oysters, world famous. My father 
tells me of shad so abundant near where I am writing that they 
were sold by the hundred at five cents apiece, where now the 
price is fifty—and mighty poor stuff at that. 
THE FISH AND OYSTER MENACE 
I talk to many fishermen hereabouts and their life is daily 
losing its charm. They spread clean nets which when hauled in 
are thick with slime and rubbish. The Government maintains 
costly fishery bureaus and admirably equipped hatcheries; mil- 
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