When you see the finished canal with its great locks, electric mules and ships coming and going, we must wonder why we succeeded when the French failed. We knew one thing that the French did not, and that was the habits of two female mosquitoes - the distributors of yellow and malarial fever.

     Major Gorgas, later General Gorgas, was on a sub-committee in charge of sanitation. When he looked over the Canal Zone, he was not particularly concerned about the engineering problems; what he saw was the tropical Jungle swarming with insects, a perfect home for yellow fever, malaria and every tropical disease and, above all, he saw the acres of little white crosses.

     Doctor Gorgas had been with Doctor Walter Reed in Cuba where they first found out the facts about the two mosquitoes - the Stegomyia, carrier of yellow fever, and the Anopheles, carrier of malarial fever. Doctor Gorgas was one of the few men who recognized that if we were to ever have a Panama Canal the real problem was going to be the extermination of these two mosquitoes - it was going to be sanitation first and then steam shovels.