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3. The despatches from various Colonies on the work done under the direction' of the Committee were received.

4. Satisfaction was expressed at the correspondence with the Governor of British Guiana as to the work done in the Colonial Laboratory.

5. The report of the Bacteriologist's Department of the East Africa Protec- torate and Uganda was read with interest.

6. The requests from Professor Nuttall with regard to the grant made in 1907-1908 for a research studentship in entomology and for an additional grant of £100 a year were considered.

Stress was laid on the excellent work being done by Professor Nuttall, largely at his own expense, and the Committee agreed to recommend that the £25 saved on the grant for a research studentship should be allowed to be utilised for the purposes of the Laboratory at Cambridge, and that a grant of £100 should be made for 1909 towards the expenses of the Laboratory. It was agreed that Professor Nuttall should be asked to supply a report towards the end of the year for inclusion in the Annual Report of the Advisory Committee, dealing with the work done in the Laboratory, and that the grant should not be promised for any definite period, but that if Professor Nuttall wished it to be renewed he should apply for it annually.

7. Note was taken of the Secretary of State's circular despatch of the 11th March, 1909, to the Governors of the Colonies contributing to the Fund.

8. The statement of the financial position of the Fund was received.

It was explained that at the end of 1909 there would be a balance of over £4,000 to the credit of the Fund, mainly due to the fact that in the first year of the existence of the Fund while the receipts were considerable the expenditure was small. The question was discussed as to what use should be made of this balance, and Sir Patrick Manson and Sir Ralph Moor called attention to the great need for buildings and other purposes of the London School of Tropical Medicine.

Mr. Read was of opinion that expenditure on buildings hardly fell within the operations of the Fund. Sir West Ridgeway thought that, while the Fund was primarily intended for research, the provision of buildings in which research could be carried on was not necessarily excluded.

It was agreed, however, that it would be more convenient to consider the question at the November meeting of the Committee when definite proposals on behalf of the London and Liverpool Schools could be laid before the Board.

9. Professor Deycke was to have attended and explained to the Board his recent investigations into the cure of leprosy in British Guiana. As he had left for Germany he was unable to appear, but the Committee expressed their readiness to meet him at some future date.

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10. The Committee were asked to advise as to the selection of an Assistant Bacteriologist for British Guiana. Sir P. Manson explained that the London School had no candidate immediately ready, but would no doubt be able to find one. was agreed that the Liverpool School should also be consulted and that any candi- dates proposed should be considered by the professional members of the Committee.

19254

No. 49.

GOLD COAST.

THE ACTING GOVERNOR to THE SECRETARY OF STATE.

(Received 9 June, 1909.)

(No. 214.)

Government House, Accra, 20th May, 1909.

[Published as No. 14 in Appendix I. to [Cd. 4999], February, 1910.]

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SIR,

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No. 50.

COLONIAL OFFICE to TREASURY.

[Answered by No. 55.]

Downing Street, 10 June, 1909. I AM directed by the Earl of Crewe to acknowledge the receipt of your letter of the 21st of April* respecting the annual contribution of £1,000 at present made from Imperial Funds to the Tropical Diseases Research Fund.

2. In view of the readiness which the Lords Commissioners of the Treasury have shown in the past to support any well devised scheme for the improvement of the sanitary conditions of the British Possessions in tropical Africa, Lord Crewe thinks that their reluctance to continue the increased grant of £1,000 is probably due to the fact that the case was not set out with sufficient fullness in the letter from this Department of the 11th of March,† and he proposes now to explain in greater detail the grounds which appear to him to justify the maintenance of the grant at its present figure.

3. Taking first the case of the Eastern Colonies, the contributions of £100 a year from Ceylon, the Straits Settlements, the Federated Malay States, and Hong Kong, do not fully represent their contributions to the Fund, for each of these Colonies is now making a separate and additional grant of £100 a year to the London School of Tropical Medicine. As this School is subsidized from the Fund, these additional grants might very well have been included in the total of the Fund, and the four Colonies would then have been shown as contributing £200 a year each towards the Fund, or twice the amount of their present contributions.

4. But these Colonies have helped the work for which the Fund was established by expenditure on a far more generous scale than contributions of £200 a year. In Ceylon there has been established a Bacteriological Institute, the Director of which receives a salary of £650 a year, and a great deal of valuable research work has been carried out in connection with "yaws" and "sprue "-work, moreover, which has gone far to clear up the etiology of these important diseases. In the Federated Malay States a costly Research Institute with an adequate staff has been established at Kuala Lumpur, and a permanent Director is now being appointed at a salary of £800 a year. Much valuable work has been recently done in connection with beri- beri, a disease which concerns the merchant shipping of this country, and which is, therefore, of Imperial as well as Colonial interest. In the Straits Settlements and Hong Kong there are also Bacteriological Institutes where much useful work has been done, an account of which will be found in the Annual Reports of the Advisory Committee which have been issued as Parliamentary Papers.

5. In consequence of the financial position of Mauritius, it has been found necessary to discontinue the contribution from that Colony for the present, but recently, when funds were available, the Colony provided a sum of £1,000 to defray the cost of the visit of Major Ross to the Island for the purpose of reporting as to the measures to be taken to reduce the mortality from malaria, and Lord Crewe has no doubt that, when the financial position of the Colony improves, it will again be willing to contribute to the Fund.

6. Turning now to the West African Colonies, Lord Crewe does not wish to lay undue stress on the generosity with which they have contributed to the cause of tropical medicine in the past, although he thinks it only right to mention one or two instances which occur to him at the moment, such as the liberal donations made towards the expenses of the first Malaria Commission, and the initial cost of the construction and equipment of the London School of Tropical Medicine, and the expenditure on anti-malarial measures, amounting in the case of Southern Nigeria to no less than £109,000 for the period 1900-6.

7. He does, however, consider that credit should be given to those Colonies for the efforts which they are making at the present time to extend the work of research, and, in this connection, he would mention that, within the last few months, the Governments of the Gambia, Sierra Leone, the Gold Coast, and Southern Nigeria, have agreed to provide the greater part of the funds required for the establishment and maintenance of a Central Research Institute at Lagos, involving a capital expenditure of £3,000, and annual contributions for maintenance of £115, £230, £460, and £690, from the four Colonies respectively.

• No. 29.

† No. 21.

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