It is stated that "Major" Ross, a surgeon we presume,
has discovered at Sierra Leone the mosquito whose bite conveys malaria to the human subject. He has forwarded parti- culars of his discovery to the Liverpool School of Tropical Diseases, and has asked for men to help him in making investigations. The Times endorses the story, and is inclined to expect great things from Major Ross's discovery, but we confess to being a little sceptical. Malaria surely exists in regions without mosquitoes, and one scarcely understands why, as the mosquito must bite everybody in its district, any. body should be exempt. No doubt if a death-dealing mos. quito could be found, and if drainage could drive it away, and if such drainage were within the limits of man's means, we might make tropical cities healthier, but then we knew that before. Rangoon has been changed by good drainage from a pest-house where Europeans died like flies in a thunder- storm, into a kind of sanatorium, but we do not hear that the mosquitoes have disappeared, or have lost their character for abnormal prolificness and viciousness. They swarm, and they can bite through linen, which the less energetic mosquito of Bengal will not trouble himself to do.
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