Show 4 o CLIMATE OF LUZON Surgeon J E Page of Admiral Dew eys flagship has reached Washington where he will await the Olympias return re-turn via the Mediterranean Although the surgeon denies that there is any cause for apprehension concerning the admirals health he admits ad-mits that all the men and officers are pretty well run down on account of the climate which he describes as n pretty bad one for a white man to exist in Since it is that way at sea where salt breezes are blowing continuously i must be pretty hard on the soldiers who lie in the muddy trenches or march through the poison swamps where the death damp hovers at night and the sun draws out the reeking miasma mi-asma from the steaming soil in daytime day-time Of course says the surgeon everyone I every-one in the fleet has suffered in health I more or less during the year owing to the terrific and longsustained heat I and the enervating climate I takes all the life out of a strong man and undoes un-does his energy and ambition The rainy season is on in the Philippines ippines again The volunteers passed through half of it last year It is a time of great severities of climate and fatalities even among natives As a general thing it is regarded as very fatal to people who are not acclimated Statistics based on observations kept for a term of years at the Jesuit observatory ob-servatory at Manila show that May and June are invariably the hottest months of the year These months and those which follow are also the sickli est and deadliest of the year while the constant rains the overflowed flat country and swollen mountain streams render military operations Impracticable Impractic-able even if our troops were in physical I physi-cal condition to undertake them I is good news indeed to hear that the volunteers are to be sent home We hope the administration will make an extra effort to keep this promise It has failed to fulfill so many Unless the men are soon relieved there will be bulletins coming in before long not of killed and wounded as has been the case but of sick and dead from the malarial influences of the climate |