THE NEXT GREAT WAR.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXXVII, Issue 1447, 16 September 1915, Page 2

THE NEXT GREAT WAR.

TiiKRK lias recently been published a hook —“Insects and Man,’’ by Mr C. A. Kaland —which gives a valuable summary and an accurate account o( the causes and effects of these insect-conveyed diseases, of the almost immeasurable damage done by insects and ticks, and of the supreme necessity for the whole human race to be enlisted in the next war —a war to be waged not between man and man, but between Man on the one side and the Anthropoid on the other, a war to be fought to the finish to decide which of the two forms ot life, this highly developed vertebrate or these malignly evolved invertebrates, is to govern our planet. Is the lord of this earth some day to be a monstrous ant or bug, a wasp or a midge, a scale insect or a tick ? Or is it to be this god-like mammal that walks erect and can see the stars, can weigh the suns and planets, that is already in touch with the supramuudane universe ? Sir Henry H. Johnston, writing in the Nineteenth Century, says that the outcome of the struggle is almost as much a toss-up at the present moment as is the result of this devastating war between Teuton, Kelt, Katin, Slav, and Turk, which is now being waged in Europe, Asia and Africa. We have reason to think and to hope that Fortune as well as Right are on the side of the nations allied against the Powers of Central and South-east Europe. Similarly, the wish being father to the thought, we believe, or we hope, that man will get the upper hand over the atithropod. But he will only do so by co-ordinating his forces and applying all his resources to the gigantic task of

eliminating from the world the germ-conveying agents, and thereby perhaps extinguishing finally those minute and primitive organisms, whose only purpose in life seems to be to play the part of the anarchist and to reduce the living world to nullity and death.