“Goodness, no. I must telephone the department”. Speechless with amazement you wonder if the police or fire department is to be called out to cope with this mosquito. In due time there appears an official equipped with an electric flash-light, a phial and a small bottle of chloroform. The malefactor--no, the suspect, for the _anopheles malefactor_ does no evil despite his sinister name--is mercifully chloroformed and deposited in the phial for a later post mortem. With his flash-light the inspector examines all the dark places of the house to seek for possible accomplices, and having learned that nobody has been bitten takes himself off. [Illustration: ANCON HOSPITAL AS RECEIVED FROM THE FRENCH] It does seem a ridiculous amount of fuss about a mosquito, doesn’t it? But since that sort of thing has been done on the Zone death carts no longer make their dismal rounds for the night’s quota of the dead, and the ravages of malaria are no longer so general or so deadly as they were. Nowadays there are no cases of yellow fever developing on the Zone, but in the earlier days when one did occur the sanitary officials set out to find the cause of infection. When the French seek to detect a criminal they follow the maxim “_Cherchez la femme_” (Look for the woman). When pursuing the yellow-fever germ to its source the Panama inspectors look for the _stegomyia_ mosquito that bit the victim--which is a little reminiscent of hunting for a needle in a haystack. A drunken man picked up on the street in Panama was taken to the hospital and there died of yellow fever. He was a stranger but his hotel was looked up and proved to be a native house occupied only by immunes, so that he could not have been infected there. Nobody seemed to care particularly about the deceased, who was buried as speedily as possible, but the Sanitary Department did care about the source of his malady. Looking up his haunts it was discovered that he was much seen in company with an Italian. Thereupon all the Italians in town were interrogated; one declared he had seen the dead man in company with the man who tended bar at the theater. This worthy citizen was sought out and was discovered hiding away in a secluded lodging sick with yellow fever. Whereupon the theater was promptly fumigated as the center of infection.