Page:The Scientific Monthly vol. 3.djvu/140

 134 THE SCIEMIFIC MONTHLY

on the Capitol, and whose very name suggests the swamps and their exhalations. The summer and autumn dangers of the Campagna were well known to the Roman satirists, Horace and Juvenal, who also men- tion the mosquito-net (conopeum). The close attention which the Roman architects paid to the construction of splendid aqueducts and drains shows their intuitive feeling about these things. A number of Roman writers on agriculture and architecture attributed malarial dis- eases to swamps, to the emanations from them, and to the small living creatures found in them. As these citations, first given by Lancisi, are always quoted in the original Latin, it may be well to translate them. Varro (116-27 B.C.), writing on husbandry, says:

It b'hould be noticed whether any localities are marFhy, for the same reasons, and because, when they dry up, certain minute animals are engendered, which the eyes can not Fee and which get into the body through the air by way of the mouth and nose, causing troublesome diseases.

Vitruvius, the architect (first century B.C.), says:

The vicinity of a marsh is to be avoided, because, when the morning airs reach the house at sunrise, the mists of theFe places arrive with them, and the wind, mixed with the^e vapors, spreads the poisonous exhalations of the creatures inhabiting the marsh, and so makes the place pestilential.

Columella, the agriculturist (first century a.d.), says:

Nor should buildings be erected near a marsh nor a military road adjoin it, becaus-e through heat it gives forth noxious poisons and engenders animals armed with dangerous stings, which fly at us in dense swarms.

Palladius says, in his poem on agriculture .(fourth century a.d.) :

A marsh is by all means to be avoided, es-pecially one lying to the east or west, and usually drying up in summer, because it engenders pestilence and harm- ful animals.

The-se extracts show that from the second centurv B.C. to the fourth century a.d. and after, the Romans had a clear notion of the relation between the fauna of marshes and malarial fever. The Hindus went even further. In the Susruta, a Sanskrit medical treatise which is at least 1,400 years old, the symptoms of malarial fever are clearly described and attributed to the bites of certain insects. Hints as to the connection between marshes and malarial fever will be found scattered through secular literature everywhere, for instance, in the dismal illustrations of the first edition of Mrs. Trollojie's ** Domestic Manners of the Amer- icans," representing the ague-ridden inhabitants of the banks of the Mississippi, or in such a tale of the marshes as Baring-Gould's '' Mehalah."' Dr. Holmes, in " The Autocrat,"' likened the intermittent forms of malarial fever to certain sliort-lived insects — in that they
 * skip a day or two."

In 1618, the Countess Chinclion, wife of the viceroy of Peru, was healed of an intermittent fever ])y the use of cinchona bark, which was

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