Sept. 16.
The telegram stating that no less a sum than £15,500 and been contributed to the fund for} the purpose, of affording tangible recognition of the services of Sir! Ronald Ross, director in chief of the Ross Institute and Hospital for Tropical Diseases, for his pioneer work in dealing with such complaints, will be read with considerable gratification physi" rendered the world during his long and arduous life. It may be thought that having due regard to the enormous) amount of suffering which has) been prevented through the manner in which he rounded off {dj ithe discoveries of contemporary. investigators and the prevention lof considerable financial loss to ithe world by the. same means) that the sum subscribed is but a meagre one. On the other hand, however, when the general conditions are taken into consideration the sum represents no mean acknowledgment of the' services which Sir Ronald has} rendered to the cause of humanity.
There is, indeed, much of romance about the manner in which the malarial germ was eventually tracked down. From ithe time of Hippocrates, malarial lor periodical fevers had engaged the attention of observers, who anticipated, vaguely, but surprising accuracy, the results of modern research. [The subject, however, remained closed book until the latter end lof the 19th century, when Laveran, a French Army surgeon serving in Algeria, on November' 16, 1880, plainly saw the living parasites under the microscope. His views were not endorsed immediately by the medical world which was then preoccupied by' ithe claims of a subsequently discredited bacillus malaria, but in 1885 the Italian pathologists Jeame round to Laveran's views:
menced to work out the his parasites, considerably forward-led by Sir Patrick Manson who. suggested that the malarial parasite had an intermediate host outside the human body, land that a suctorial insect, w! would probably be found to be 2 particular mosquito was required for its development. As the Encyclopaedia Britannica in its lo dealing with the subject]
Following up this line investigation, Major Ronald Ross in 1895 found that if a mosquito sucked blood containing" the' lao, which broke away and became free, and 1897 "he discovered " peculiar pigmented cells, which afterwards turned out to be the parasites of faestivo-autumnal malaria early stage of development, within. the stomach-wall of mosquitoes which had been fed on malarial blood. He: further found. that only mosquitoes' of the. genus 'Anopheles had these cells," and that they did not get them' when fed on healthy blood. Then, turn:
attention to the malaria is, he worked out the life-history of these cells within the body of the mosquito, He saw that they increased in size, di and became full of" Sliform rogerly Into the body-cavity of their insect host. Finally, he saw the spores: accumulate within the cells of the salivary glands, "and discovered that they' ly passed down the salivary ducts and along the grooved hypopharynx into. the seat of puncture, thus causing infection in a fresh vertebrate host (Sambon), To apply the discoveries to the malaria of man was an obvious step, In workin out the details the italian schoo have again taken a prominent part."
'The experiments on the Roman Campagna, when proof of the correctness of the theories advanced was obtained in most romantic manner, is too new human memory to need recounting here, though it undoubtedly set' at rest the old belief in paludism or of the exfhalation of. miasmic vapours from the ground—a theory which was solemnly advanced during the "40s of last century in connection with the army: barracks at Stanley, Hongkong, where it was for a long time earnestly contended that the Jgases from opened soil were responsible for the malaria from. of the troops There are, it is stated still points upon which further elucidation necessary, but the work of such 8 the French and Italian investigators, rounded out by that of Manson and Ross conferred an inestimable benefit upon mankind.
It can, never be fully rewarded in terms of but itis pleasant to record that such work does not unrecognized, and that the aged physician' in eve of his has been made acquainted with the feeling of gratitude which his fe all over the world, even though they may not have heard of his name, must undoubtedly feel for his work,
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.