190 NOTES—ORIGINAL AND SELECTED.
The members of the Club, who had been favoured throughout with gloriously
fine weather, now made their way to the station and left for London by the 9.15
train.
EXHIBITION—"BIOLOGY AND DISEASE."
Saturday, 36th February 1910.
The Annual Conversazione of the Municipal Technical Institute, West Ham,
was held on this evening. On the occasion the building was closed to the public,
and was included as part of the Conversazione "show."
A series of living specimens illustrating pond life was displayed in the
Curator's Room. Mr. J. Wilson, F.R.M.S., very kindly provided the
microscopic material and gave demonstrations on the exhibits.
The room over the Curator's Room was devoted to a special collection illus-
trating "Biology and Disease." Specimens of Blood-sucking Insects (including
Tsetse-flies and Mosquitoes), Microscopic Preparations of Trypanosoma,
Bacteria, &c., and many diagrams illustrating the part played by the insects in the
transmission of Malaria, Yellow Fever, Sleeping Sickness, Bubonic Plague, and
similar diseases. The Club is indebted for the loan of specimens and diagrams to
Col, A. Alcock, I.M.S., F.R.S. (London School of Tropical Medicine) ; Mr.
E. E. Austen (Department of Zoology, British Museum), and Prof. E. A.
Minchin (Lister Institute of Preventive Medicine).
It is now known that several kinds of insects and allied creatures are of vital
importance to mankind as agents in the transmission of certain diseases, such as
Malaria, Yellow Fever, Sleeping Sickness, Bubonic Plague, etc. The
systematic study of the life-histories and parasites of some hitherto-neglected
families and genera of Arthropods—as Gnats (Mosquitoes), Tsetse-flies
(Glossina), Gad-flies (Tabanidae), Bot-flies (Oestridae), Domestic-flies (Musca
and Stomoxys), certain Hemiptera-Pediculi, Ticks (Ixodoidae), and Fleas
(Siphonaptera)—has been pursued, both at home and in tropical countries, with
astonishing success. As Professor Osier has said, these observations are going
to have an enormous influence on the history of the world and of mankind,
because the discoveries made and to be made will lead to precautions and the
establishment of sanitary methods which will render the Tropics habitable by the
White Man and by European domestic animals. In Professor Minchin's words :
—"We hear or read often of such-and-such a country being uninhabitable by
Europeans, ou account of its deadly climate; but, when we look into the matter,
we find that it is not the climate at all that is to blame, but that the white-races
are killed off by diseases, caused by animal parasites, with which they are
inoculated by the bite of some blood-thirsty arthropods."
The subject is of especial interest to naturalists as showing the importance of
the practical study of insects and parasites by entomologists and others—studies
which unthinking people are only too ready to sneer at as trivialities and
dilettantism. The exhibition was, therefore, arranged as one very pertinent to
the plan of our Museum.
Dr. H. Emlyn Jones, Dr. T. J. Williams, and Mr. H. Whitehead. B.Sc.,
gave demonstrations on the exhibits during the course of the evening. Altogether
about a dozen microscopes were in use, instruments being kindly lent by Messrs.
Wilson, W. Cole, J. C. Shenstone, Dr. Jones, and Dr. Williams.
Through the kindness of Dr. Thresh, a number of drawings of microscopic
objects found in drinking water were displayed.