"True, Col. Flinter, Field Marshall Count O'Reilly, and the rest of the long list of early 'observers' did not know what uncinariasis was. But is it necessary that we have a record of microscopic examinations of the feces of the people they describe to realize what can be read between the lines? Convicts, adventurers, and gypsies may have formed part of the element that colonized Porto Rico, but we cannot believe that these were all, nor that their descendants were 'lazy' and 'worthless.' "We cannot believe that vicious idleness comes natural to the Spanish colonist, even in the Tropics, for the very reason that we have seen these descendants at their very worst, after the neglect of four centuries by their mother country, and after the laborious increase of an anemic population in the face of a deadly disease, whose nature was neither known nor studied, work from sunrise to sunset and seek medical attention, not because they felt sick, but because they could no longer work. "We strongly feel that these writers have unconsciously described uncinariasis. Are the Spanish people considered 'lazy' by those who know them? Were those Spaniards who conquered Mexico, Peru, and all South America, who formed so formidable a power in the Middle Ages, a lazy people? "Is it 'laziness' or disease that is this very day attracting the attention of the United States to the descendant of the pure-blooded English stock in the Southern Appalachian Range, in the mountains of Carolina and Tennessee, the section of our country where the greatest predominance of 'pure American blood' occurs, despised by the negro who calls him 'poor white trash'?" During the year 1914-15 there were 6,644 deaths of children under two years of age, which constituted 28.8 per cent of the total mortality of the Island. Approximately 14 out of every 100 children born, died in infancy, and the death rate for the total population was 5.55 per cent for children under one year of age, and 7.71 per cent for children under two years of age. Diarrhea and enteritis were responsible for 33.8 per cent of infant mortality; congenital debility for 13.14 per cent; infantile tetanus for 10.32; while disease of the respiratory organs caused 16.17 per cent of the infant mortality.