COUNTRY LIFE
SOME while ago—apropos shellholes that became fishponds—I wrote something about the mystery of the arrival of fish in such places. Both the best example I know and the best explanation of such a mystery is sent by a correspondent, the Rev. T. Webber, who has had a long experience of life in India. " Some thirty years ago in North India there occurred simultaneously both a bumper harvest and an unprecedented outbreak of malarial fever. Such recurrence of fever and good crops has now been plausibly explained. The villages are largely built of mud and repaired with mud, all dug from the same place. The big hole thus made is filled with water in the rainy season, and when this dries up later small fish are habitually found in the last pool. The most beneficial conditions of weather for the crops occur when the first rains cease and are resumed at a later date. Now the most plausible theory for the occurrence of fish is that the spawn is carried on the legs of birds. How- ever this may be, spawn is conveyed to the mud-pond and fish are hatched. They do an invaluable work, being driven to feed chiefly on the wrigglers ' that would develop into mosquitoes. Such is the normal prevention of extensive malaria, usually imparted by the bite of the mosquito. The rains more or less coincide with the spawning of the fish, which are very true to the seasonal date in this regard. Conse- quently, when the rains are late there is no spawn for the birds to carry off, the pond in the mud-hole is fishless, ond the mosquitoes, which breed at any old time, multiply in waters free from their chief enemy." It all sounds complete. Mr. Webber has demonstrated that bumper crops and malaria have as true a causal nexus as Darwin alleged between the number of old maiden ladies and good clover crops.
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