Not the least interesting phase of the kissing-bug scare is the rapidity and completeness of its decadence. It is but ten years ago that the newspapers rang with it; that victims of the bite, in every city, were fleeing, white-faced and racked with forebodings, to doctor or hospital. To-day, both the Melanolestes and the "conenose" are abroad in the land. Doubtless, upon provocation, they are "spearing" others as they speared the outraged clergyman. But that's all. The bepunctured ones do not seek the consolations of medical or journalistic attention. They put a little wet mud or peroxide on the place and let it go at that. Exit another bogy!
OUR REAL POISON PERIL
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
Lassoing Wild Animals In Africa {pages 526-538}
By GUY H. SCULL
Field Manager of the Buffalo Jones African Expedition
II
SOMEHOW everything seemed to happen on moving day with the Buffalo Jones Expedition in East Africa. Exactly why this should have been it is impossible to tell. Perhaps the reason may be found in the fact that a considerable part of our time was occupied in moving. No doubt the circumstance could be traced to some such perfectly reasonable cause. But we chose to look upon it otherwise.