Parasitic Conquest.
I was reading the other day about how to kill mice.
The cat, it seems, is altogether out-of -date. So is the cheese trap, which has for so long been my standby when the mice get into my papers. We have no use any more for such crude contrivances.
Everything is microbes nowadays, and since those microscopic nuisances do so much harm, it is well to chain them, when we can, to the Car of Progress, and make them draw a load. If they pull in proportion not to their size but their power, the car aforesaid will speedily distance all automobiles.
The method is this. “You take “a ground squirrel that has a certain disease that does not kill the squirrel but will kill the mouse. You get the germ of the disease from the squirrel—by sticking a needle into him, I suppose—and you cause it to multiply in a mass of gelatin or of dough, by drawing the needle through the soft substance and leaving it for a few days. Then you place the infected gelatin or dough where the mice will eat of it, and in a short time all the mice will get the disease, and will die of it. The plan is better than the use of poison, because the mice almost always get out of their holes to die, and so do not decay behind the partitions. Moreover, the disease does not spread to chickens or dogs or other animals that might eat the dough, and has no effect upon human beings.
All this seems cold-blooded, but if I were a mouse I should prefer such a mode of execution to the teeth of a cat or the jaws of a trap.
It is by such a method—the introduction of a fatal parasite—that they are trying in Massachusetts to kill, or at least to check, the plague of gypsy moths that is destroying the shade-trees of that lovely State— a moth whose billions of mischief-makers have all sprung from the three or four imported larva which that unsuspecting French entomologist let the wind blow from his window-sill so many years ago.
Well, brethren, in our fight with spiritual evils we also might as well be up-to-date.
We have been fighting them with house cats, haven't we? and with traps. and with poison—with all kinds of violent and direct attacks; and I, for one, would not intermit a single one of these.
But the really deadly attack is by parasite.
What is the parasite that is fatal to all kinds of evil?
It is the microbe of goodness, to be sure.
But that is no disease? Of course not; it is life and health; but it is death to the evil. Brethren, the best of all ways to get evil out is to crowd good in.