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1 Mar., 1898. ] QUEENSLAND AGRICULTURAL JOURNAL. 219 
Anyone who has experience of malarious districts well knows a number of 
cases in which the patient attributes the fever that torments him solely to 
having slept a few hours in a place where several times he had perhaps 
remained while awake without harm. Three years ago I made, with my 
colleague, Dionisi, various excursions into malarious localities for the purpose 
of study, and more especially with the object of collecting from the 
inhabitants the results of their experience—an experience which one finds 
with difficulty in books. Many precautions which they take against the fever 
are taken, one would say, to defend them from the sting of insects. They 
avoid going out at night; they are very careful not to sleep in the open air; 
they hermetically close the windows—windows with badly fitting shutters, 
which might impede the ingress of insects, but certainly not of air and of the 
germs which it might contain. They take great care of their mosquito-curtain, 
making it of very close net, under which they sleep, thoroughly shut in, 
notwithstanding the great heat. 
“Tt is interesting to remember that Emin Pasha never omitted to take a 
mosquito-net with him on his African journeys, and he attributed to this 
precaution his not having had fever, the malarial agent in his idea being a 
corpuscular substance of which he supposed the close net did not permit the 
passage. Nicolas, in his book on the Hygiene of Camps in Marshy Places, 
thus expresses himself on this question: ‘And the mosquito-net, well shut, is 
indispensable at night. Without attributing to the puncture of mosquitoes 
any relation whatever with the microbes of the fever, one may be certain that 
irritation by them produces sleeplessness and predisposes to the fever.’ On 
the estates and farms visited by us in the Campagna, the overseers, who are. 
less frequently attacked by the fever than the workmen, protect themselves 
with great care from the bites of insects, especially during sleep. On the 
estate of Porto, near Finmicino, where a bad type of malaria prevails, and 
which I visited several times in company with my colleague, Dionisi, in the 
height of summer, we obtained the greatest amount of information about the 
habits of mosquitoes, and the results of the experience of the inhabitants on’ 
the way in which fever is caught. The greater number think that the fever is 
taken almost always during sleep. A very brief staysometimes suffices—even one 
night. But ordinarily, even in districts very subject to malaria, a longer stay is 
necessary, so thatthe workmen whe go on tothe property at the beginning of July: 
for the threshing commence to get ill as a rule eight or ten days after their 
arrival. On the other hand, those who go in September for the working of the 
ground often get ill more quickly—after only two or three days’ stay. Many 
have observed that in autumn after the rains the mosquitoes increase, and like- 
wise the fevers, and, as the season advances, they disappear together little by 
little. Thus, collecting from the inhabitants (who are really much better 
informed about malaria than some medical men) the results of their experi- 
ence, the conviction grows upon one that, if malaria were inoculated by 
mosquitoes into man, all the questions which I have put in a preceding para- 
graph would reccive an adequate answer. Malaria behaves itself with reeurd 
to man as if the malarial germs were inoculated by mosquitoes.” 
Bignami further on says: “ It is known that those do not easily catch fever 
who inhabit the shepherds’ huts, which are made in the form of a cone, with the 
hearth excavated in the ground in the middle and with an aperture near the apex 
of the cone, so that on account of the smoke the inmates are free from insects. 
asc a Tt is known that carefully covering the skin keeps off the fever to a 
certain point: the inhabitants of malarious places never omit this precaution, 
T have heard it related by Professor Marchiafava that a Russian medical man 
he knew of considered it sufficient to cover the body completely, even to the 
face and hands, with woollen stuffs in order to escape the fever, and was so 
convinced of this that he himself always went to sleep in places subject to the 
severer forms of malaria protected by gloves and sth a kind of mask over his 
face ; and he never took the fever.” dee 
