40 THE AUSTRALIAN NATURALIST. 
This state of things was due simply to the presence of the 
mosquito. Destroy the mosquito and no matter how damp, 
wet and undrained the plains, how dense the forest and jungle. 
Malarial fevers do not exist without these insects. The map 
of the world has even been altered by the biting flies ; history 
records that the Portuguese expeditions from the east coast 
of Africa in the sixteenth century were forced back to the 
coastal settlements by the attacks of the Tsetse Flies killing 
all their horses and cattle when they attempted to penetrate 
into the interior. 
Drinking stagnant water containing decaying vegetable 
matter was said to give one fever. That if one slept on the 
ground in the tropical scrubs, the rising mists (miasma) would 
give one fever. The opening up and ploughing of new 
land for plantations were also looked upon as one of the 
causes of fever appearing. Only a few years ago these were 
the popular ideas on malarial fevers. 
It was never suspected that the mosquitoes had anything 
to do with malarial fevers that attacked man in all the tropical 
jungles. 
Thus miasma was the” terror of the tropics. Boyce in his 
“Mosquito or Man’’ says: ‘‘It is almost impossible to realise 
to-day, the incubus which this nightmare has been upon the 
world’s progress. In the old days the young man, be he 
soldier, sailor, or young merchant, went to what was known 
as ‘the white man’s grave.’ Amongst the British garrisons 
69 per cent. was not an uncommon mortality rate.”’ 
Nearer home in the sugar lands of North Queensland and 
the forests of New Guinea, every white man who remained 
any time suffered more or less from malarial fevers and none 
of the modern precautions were taken against mosquitoes. Up 
to twenty years ago fever was one of the things that had to be 
put up with in the tropics. Yet, in 1848, Dr. Nott, of Mo- 
bile Alabama, U.S.A., published his jopinion that yellow 
fever might be caused by mosquitoes, and in 1853 Dr. Lewis 
Danial Beauperthuy, who had spent the best years of his 
life studying the causes of yellow fever in South America and 
the West Indies, positively stated that the mosquito was the 
primary cause of yellow fever. This was the first light thrown 
upon the subject, but Beauperthuy’s work was almost for- 
gotten when King in 1883 published his book, ‘‘Mosquito 
and Malaria,”” in New York. In 1881, Finlay had brought 
fresh evidence to prove that not only was yellow fever caused 
by mosquitoes but identified the yellow fever mosquito, which 
we now know as Stegomyia calopus. 
