Article September 15, 1898 Issue

MRS. MOSQUITO'S GUILT

The St. Louis Republic

Science is the arch iconoclast. It smashes the monuments of deduction and shatters the statues erected on the altar of vanity to self-opinionation with a club compared to which the famous bludgeon of Hercules was but a gosling's feather, and an impact compared to which that of Sullivan's "terrible right" in the heyday of its dynamic power was as slight as the blow of a zephyr. Hardly a day passes but it crushes some idol of false knowledge and leaves its worshipers to weep and gnash their teeth in humiliation and disappointment over the ruins.

The latest havoc made by the club of science upon our time-honored beliefs is its overthrow of all commonly accepted theories concerning the propagation of malarial fever—variously called "chills and fever," "ague," and "swamp fever." Most of us thought—and we derived our motive for so doing from the family physician—that this febrile affection with the numerous aliases was taken into the system in the form of robust bacilli, either with the food or drinking water, or was inhaled through the nostrils or mouth into the lungs, whence these bacilli emigrated into the circulation, causing our inhabited anatomies to become by turns as hot as fire or as cold as ice.

Few have ever gone far along life's road and not experienced these penalties inflicted by malarial fever.

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