U. S. Ratcatchers

The League of Nations last week landed a party of scientists in Manhattan to take lessons in ratcatching. The scientists were quarantine and health officers from France, Germany, Great Britain, Holland and Spain, nations whose ships go to the plague-infested Orient and return with a continuous threat of reintroducing the awful Black Death to Europe./= The U. S. has been happily free of plague for a dozen years, because of strict water front precautions. The Europeans were sent to study those precautions at firsthand. Ships carry rats which carry fleas which carry bubonic plague.

To kill rats hidden within ships, after every known person and economically valuable creature aboard has been removed, hatches, ports and other openings are tightly closed. In every closed space hydrocyanic gas, instantly fatal to animal life, is released.** European sanitarians have been doing that. But their methods have not exterminated every rat aboard ship. In Manhattarn they learned the necessity of diligence in tracing rat droppings to rat nests between beams, in pipe coverings, under floors, over ceilings. Into every hole into which a rat may squeeze, deadly gas must be sprayed. After fumigation the ship must be aerated, dead rats searched out. Sometimes the search reveals a hapless stowaway.

/= In the 14th and 15th Centuries bubonic plague devastated Asia, Northern Africa and Europe, killed 60,000,000. Boccaccio's De cameron contains a vivid description of that epidemic in Italy: Daniel Defoe's History of the Plague of 1665 describes a visitation when 70,000 died in London. To prevent plague's spread, Venice segregated victims for 40 days (quaranta giorni) and thus originated quarantine.

**In Nevada hydrocyanic gas is used to execute convicts.

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