Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 62.djvu/531

Rh twenty dollars an acre. Thousands of acres in this region are still covered with the primeval forest, and the bears and deer still roaming there offer splendid opportunities for the chase, as evidenced by the late visit of our chief executive to those regions for the purpose of hunting. Why is not this land thickly settled and why is it not worth from two to five hundred dollars an acre? If it produces from one to two or more bales of cotton on an acre, and it does, it ought to be worth the above named figures. A bale of cotton to the acre can be produced for thirteen dollars, leaving a net profit of twenty to forty dollars for each bale or forty to eighty or more dollars for each acre of land cultivated. Moreover, this land has been doing that for years and will do it for years to come without the addition of one dollar's worth of fertilizer. Land that will produce a net profit of forty to eighty dollars an acre is a splendid investment at one, two or even three hundred dollars an acre. Yet this land does not sell in the market for anything like so much, because the demand is not sufficient, for white people positively object to living in the 'Delta' on account of malarial chills and fevers. A man said to me not long ago that he would go to the 'Delta' that day if he were sure that his own life or the lives of the members of his family would not be shortened thereby. There are thousands exactly like him, and the only reason that these thousands do not go there to buy lands and make homes is on account of chills and fevers. But there is a time coming, and that not far distant, when malaria in the 'Delta' will not menace the would-be inhabitants. When that time comes it will be the richest and most populous region in the United States.

There can be no doubt that many people are kept away from the sunny southern skies because of the dangers of malaria, sometimes fancied 'tis true, but quite as often real. It behooves us to remove this danger entirely. 1 feel sure the day is soon coming when chills and fevers will have lost their terrors because we shall surely learn how to avoid them. It is most propitious that these wonderful discoveries in regard to malaria and yellow fever were made on the eve of the south 's great awakening along industrial and educational lines.

If the experiments of Ross, Manson, Celli, Sambon, Low and others demonstrate that malaria can be avoided; and if the experiments of Carroll, Reed, Lazear and Agramonte demonstrate that quarantine and fumigation are useless and that yellow fever can be controlled by controlling mosquitoes or by keeping inside of a wire screen out of their way, then I venture to predict that those experiments will go down in the annals of the south as the most important of the nineteenth century.