PREFACE
My publisher tells me that this volume will be regarded as a sequel to ‘The Minor Horrors of War,’ and he assures me that sequels are not a success. I have no doubt my publisher is right, because if publishers were not invariably right, and authors invariably wrong, how can one explain the fact that publishers are proverbially prosperous and prominent people, whereas authors are notoriously penniless and obscure? In spite of his warning, however, I propose to publish this little volume, for there still ‘air some catawampous chawers in the small way, too, as graze upon a human pretty strong’—as ‘one of them inwading conquerors at Pawkins’s’ called them—that were unmentioned in my earlier book.
I am indebted to the kindness of the Editor and Proprietors of the British Medical Journal for permission to reprint Chapters I to IX and Chapter XI, and to the Editor of The Journal of Economic Biology for permission to reprint the twelfth chapter, of this book, and I offer them my thanks. I also thank Mr. Hugh Scott (the University Curator in Entomology), and Professor G. H. Carpenter of the Royal College of Science, Dublin, for much kindly help.
A. E. SHIPLEY.
Christ’s College Lodge, Cambridge,
April 1916.