CHAMBER OF HORRORS

Shannon News, 31 August 1926, Page 2

CHAMBER OF HORRORS

SOME INSECT CRIMINALS. ■ . ni BRITISH MUSEUM COLLECTION. •' / Madame Tussaud’s is close'd, but what Marylebone can no longer show us is now supplied by South Kensington. At Madame Tussaud’s the Chamber of Horrors was. considered by some to be a disgrace to London, but the Natural History Museum has expressed the idea without giving offence. In the Great Hail of the Museum an exhibition lias just been opened of life-like wax models of notorious criminals of. the insect world —lifelike but not life-size, for these creatures are only terrible specks. None of these models is less than twenty times as long as its original, and most are longer, some 200 times as long. Some of their weapons, the disease germs they carry for man’s undoing, are magnified to a thousand times, their actual length.

Not all these horrors are horrible in appearance, says a London writer. There is not much to be said for the appearance of the ticks or the lice which troubled soldiers so terribly in.the war and spread typhus and trench fever, or the rat fleas that carry plague. The tsetse flies, rather like bluebottles, are pleasanter. But the mosquitoes arc as beautiful as great 1 dragonflies, and the sand-flies, covered with gossamer threads like thistledown, are splendid fellows. Splendid, that is,, met in a museum under a case and made of wax, In the Syrian Desert, disabling on the march three men out of four with the brief sand-fly fever, they g.re less attractive. Of course, this latest waxworks show ~has a serious object. It is not meant merely to make one’s flesh creep It is to show what modern medical crusaders are after in the fever-ridden spaces of the earth, and to arouse the public interest which will help and encourage them. - Not only the winged insect but the chrysalis, the grub) and the egg arc shown in many cases. It is at the egg stage, when they are for the ' time immobile, that the best work can be done for the extermination of these pests. But the tsetse fly has no eggs; instead ~it deposits grubs, which crawl away into com-, parative safety. But even in the ; case of the gruls, if their places of refug'e arc destroyed their own destruction must follow.

Many insects, of course, like the common house-fly, merely carry-com-mon filth disease germs on their bodies because they come from filthy places. The museum has a model of an ordinary domestic refuse heap, showing liow many people provide the disease-forcing beds the flies come from. But there are many disease germs that can only be communicated to man and beast through particular insect pests, so that to exterminate the pests is to exterminate the diseases; such are the mosquitoes, which carry malaria and yellow fever, the tsetse flies which carry sleeping sickness, the rat fleas which carry plague—and Avould disappear with the rats^ —and jhe sand-flies with their comparatively harmless, but tiresome sand-fly fever. Science, which has cleared Panama of disease an-1 made it a health resort, is clearing nuge tracts of Africa, and its crusade must make all the difference between success and failure in the colonisation and development of some of the most fertile areas of the earth.