A Monograph of the Tsetse Flies (Genus Glossina, Westwood) Based on the Collection in the British Museum

Abstract

SOME fifty years ago J. O. Westwood gave a description of a “destructive species of dipterous insect known under the name of Tsetse,” and referred it to the genus Glossina, first established twenty years previously by Wiedemann. From that time onwards references to the tsetse fly and its association with a mysterious disease fatal to horses, cattle, and other animals become very numerous in the writings of travellers and naturalists, and various were the theories propounded to explain the relation of the fly to the disease. Drysdale, in 1879, seems to have been the first to suggest that the tsetse fly disease might be of an infective nature, the infecting agent being conveyed by the bite of the fly. In 1895 and 1897 the well-known reports of Lieut.—Colonel Bruce appeared. He described the tsetse fly disease or nagana met with in Zululand, and established the fact that it is due to a protozoan blood parasite, the Trypanosoma Brucei, which is conveyed by the bites of the tsetse fly from affected to healthy animals. As horses and cattle are unable to exist in the districts inhabited by the fly, the problem of transport in these “fly belts” is a serious one, and the tsetse fly and its distributiohave assumed great economic importance. In India? and Burma there is a similar, if not identical, disease known as surra, which is also conveyed by a biting fly, perhaps a species of Stomoxys.

A Monograph of the Tsetse Flies (Genus Glossina, Westwood). Based on the Collection in the British Museum.

By E. E. Austen, with a Chapter on Mouth-Parts by H. J. Hansen, Phil. Doc. Pp. ix + 319. (London: Printed by Order of the Trustees, 1903.) Price 15s.