MALARIA, MOSQUITOES AND THE ESSEX MARSHES 45
tinued Mr. Barrett-Lennard, "said he would give up going to
Court as George III annoyed him by asking always about his
ague". Bacot also records how, when about twenty-five years
previously, he used to go moth-hunting in the district, between
Rayleigh and Thundersley, he contracted a feverish attack which
his doctor diagnosed as ague.
Among the many works of reference that have been perused
for material for this address was a book by Lindsay, Retired
Surgeon, Army Medical Department, entitled, An Essay on
Malaria and its Consequences. This was published in 1895—only
a couple of years before Ross found sufficient evidence to fill in
the gaps of the story of the mode of transmission of malaria.
Lindsay, of whom it was written that he was not a tyro but one
who may not unreasonably be deemed somewhat of an expert,
eliminated oxygen, nitrogen, and aquaeous vapour, and put the
blame for malaria on carbonic acid gas. After eighty pages of
reasoning and argument, he felt able to write, "I think that it
must be conceded, by those who have been good enough to follow
closely my reasoning and are, at the same time, well acquainted
experimentally, in their own persons and in their professional
practice, with the manifestations and developments of malarial
disease—that there does exist a marvellous coincidence, both of
procedure and consequence, between the two (i.e., carbonic acid
and malaria)—that, in fact, they are so alike, that there is little
or no ground left for disputing their identity". Later, after re-
viewing in some detail, six cases (out of very many) he had been
associated with, and allowing for the fact that they did not afford
a complete representation of the phenomena of the disease, he
wrote, ". . . . they show, as the indubitable actual results of
malaria, many of the identical conditions which I have previously
described as reasonably to be expected from the acknowledged
essential nature of carbonic acid and its action on the living animal
organism and, in so doing, to add a reasonability, of great
urgency, to my identification of the poison of malaria with that
gas, which, further, is the only known hurtful constituent of the
atmosphere that is present in all known malarious situations and
is capable of these effects".
Two last references from The Essex Review. The Reverend
W. Gibbens, writing in 1902, referred to an earlier article
'Vanishing Essex Villages' and stated, "The writer, Percy Clarke,
R.A., has entirely omitted, as not of necessity of illustrating his
subject, any mention of the ague very general in the parishes of
Fobbing, Corringham, Mucking, Tilbury, and adjoining districts.
I speak from personal knowledge. About forty-seven years ago
(i.e., about 1854) I was curate of the parish of Laindon and was
well acquainted with the beneficed clergy and their curates of the
above-mentioned parishes, and I can testify that after a year's
residence, ague was the cause of more than one of them resigning
their livings, particularly in Fobbing and Corringham. Of course,
the building of sea walls, and superior systems of drainage of the