Abstract
IN the second edition of this work the chief new features are the historical introduction, dealing with the development of medical entomology, and the additions to various chapters of material derived from the author's experience as a sanitary officer in the U.S. Army during the War. The external features used in classification and the life-history of the insects of medical and veterinary importance are considered, but internal anatomy is dealt with only in a few cases. Methods of control are carefully discussed, and references given in the most important cases to the original sources of the respective methods. The most detailed chapters are those devoted to lice, mosquitoes, house-flies, larvae which produce myiasis, and ticks, and these are the chapters which will be most useful to the majority of readers. The accounts of other insects, e.g. fleas, are less satisfactory from the medical point of view; thus, although the characters of Xenopsylla cheopis are given there is no reference to X. astia or to X. brasiliensis-which the reader should be shown how to differentiate from X. cheopis, and the author is in error in regard to the structure labelled as hypo-pharynx in the figures of the fleas shown on p. 322. In the brief account of the life-history of Dipylidium caninum the work of Joyeux (1916) might have been referred to. The observations of Dr. and Mrs. Connal (1922) on the life-cycle of Filaria (Loa) loa, and the work of Christophers (1922) on the segments of mosquito larvae, were perhaps published just too late to receive notice. In the description of Fig. 20 the term pupa (of the house-fly) should be replaced by puparium. Good drawings would have been more helpful to the reader than certain of the photographic illustrations provided, e.g. Figs. 91, 140, 141, 143, 152, 161, 168, 180, 210.
Medical and Veterinary Entomology: a Textbook for Use in Schools and Colleges as well as a Handbook for the Use of Physicians, Veterinarians and Public Health Officials.
By Prof. William B. Herms. Second edition, completely revised. Pp. xv + 462. (New York: The Macmillan Co.; London: Macmillan and Co., Ltd., 1923.) 28s. net.
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Medical and Veterinary Entomology: a Textbook for Use in Schools and Colleges as well as a Handbook for the Use of Physicians, Veterinarians and Public Health Officials. Nature 114, 426 (1924). https://doi.org/10.1038/114426a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/114426a0