One venomous creature there is in this country which may justly
be termed a public peril, in the widest sense. Proportionately to
population, more victims fall to it yearly in the United States
than to the dreaded cobra in India. Some twelve thousand
Americans are killed every year by its bite. Three hundred
thousand more are made seriously ill from the after effects.
Unfortunately, the virus works so slowly that alarm is stilled.
The victims do not sicken at once. The bite is forgotten; but ten
days or two weeks after, the subject falls into a fever. His
blood is poisoned within him. Eventually, in extreme cases, he
becomes delirious, succumbs to a stupor, and dies.
Yet, because there is nothing horrific to the sensation-loving
imagination in the malaria-bearing mosquito, public inertia or
ignorance tolerates it with a grin and permits it to breed in
city and country alike throughout the length and breadth of the
nation. Compared with it, as a real menace, all the combined
brood of snakes, scorpions, centipedes, tarantulas, and other pet
bugaboos of our childish romanticism are utterly negligible; are
as figment to reality, as shadow to substance. It is perhaps
characteristic of our wryly humorous American temperament that we
should have invested the unimportant danger with all the
shuddering attributes of horror, and have made of the real peril
a joke to be perennially hailed with laughter in a thousand
thoughtless prints.
*****************************************************************
Vol. XXIII October 1910 No. 4