orce, or even an army large enough for adequate
defense, when it has a constant death-rate of ten per cent per annum,
and an ever recurrent one of twenty to thirty per cent, by the sweep of
some pestilence? The bubonic plague alone is estimated to have slain
thirty millions of people within two centuries in Mediaeval Europe, and
to have turned whole provinces into little better than deserts.

In malaria, however, we have a disease enemy of somewhat different class
and habits. While other great infections attack man usually where he is
strongest and most numerous, malaria, on the contrary, lies in wait for
him where he is weakest and most scattered, upon the frontiers of
civilization and the borders of the wilderness. It is only of late years
that we have begun to realize what a deadly and persistent enemy of the
frontiersman and pioneer it is. We used to hear much of climate as an
obstacle to civilization and barrier to settlement. Now, for climate we
read "malaria." Whether on the prairies or even the tundras of the
North, or by the jungles and swamps of the Equator, the _thing that
killed_ was eight times out of ten the winged messenger of death with
his burden of malaria-infection. The "chills and fever," "fevernager,"
"mylary," that chattered the teeth and racked the joints of the pioneer,
from Michigan to Mississippi, was one and the same plague with the
deadly "jungle fever," "African fever," "black fever" of the tropics,
from Panama to Singapore. Hardly a generation ago, along the advancing
front of civilization in the Middle West, the whole life of the
community was colored with a malarial tinge and the taste of quinine
was as familiar as that of sugar. To this day, over something like
three-quarters of the area of these United States, the South, Middle
West, and Far West, if you feel headachy and bilious and "run down," you
sum it all up by saying that you are feeling "malarious." Dwellers upon
the rich bottom-lands expected to shake every spring and fall with
almost the same regularity as they put on and shed their winter
clothing. Readers of Frank Stockton will remember the gales of merriment
excited by his quaint touch of the incongruous in making the prospective
bridegroom of the immortal Pomona change the date of their wedding day
from Tuesday to Monday, because, on figuring the matter out, he had
discovered that Tuesday was his "chill-day."

Though the sufferer from ague seldom received very much sympathy