NEW CHARGES AGAINST THE INSECTS

Inherited traditions and slowly acquired experience usually are factors of dominating importance in determining the point of view acquired by the average person. The physician, guided by the same impulses and converted to the slowly evolved theories of the transmission of infectious disease from place to place and man to man by the transport of a specific infectious micro-organism, seemed almost baffled at first when the rôle of insects as carriers of infection was suggested to him. The splendid investigations of recent years which have disclosed the relations of insects to malaria, yellow fever, bubonic plague and sleeping sickness have awakened the greatest admiration and at the same time have created the utmost surprise at what was earlier an unexpected and unsuspected mode of contagion. A trained entomologist, on the other hand, accustomed to see insects and study their habits, has expressed his surprise that it should have required so