20 MOSQUITOES OF NORTH AMERICA 



EARLY ACCOUNTS OF THE BIOLOGY AND STRUCTURE OF 



MOSQUITOES. 



Although simple lenses were known in very ancient times, and although many- 

 interesting and important observations were made with these simple lenses, it 

 was not until the invention of the compound microscope, at the end of the six- 

 teenth century and its development during the seventeenth century, that com- 

 petent observations began to be made upon the very small animals. In that 

 century, and especially towards its close, a number of patient workers examined 

 with these new instruments the small, common forms of life about them and 

 discovered many most interesting and, to them, almost miraculous facts con- 

 cerning their microscopic appearance and concerning their habits and methods 

 of life. 



The organization of the proboscis of the mosquito and its manner of function- 

 ing were the objects of especial interest to the early investigators with lens and 

 microscope. The work of some of these anatomists, when we consider the in- 

 struments at their command, was most remarkable, and while faulty in the light 

 of our present knowledge, gives testimony to the enthusiasm and devotion of 

 these men. It would lead too far to enter into a discussion of the early investi- 

 gators. A brief account of them, and their relation, to the facts as found by 

 modern workers, is given by Dimmock, while Meinert, in his " Fluernes Mund- 

 dele," gives a very complete account of these early researches on the composition 

 of the mosquito's proboscis. There were naturally enough discrepancies as to 

 the component parts of the proboscis, but Swammerdamm, in his work of 1669, 

 had already determined them correctly. 



Many of the earlier works, like Earth's " De Culice dissertatio," contain little 

 that is original, but quote, as was then the fashion, at great length from the 

 writings of ancient authors. 



Robert Hooke, in his " Micrographia, or Some Physiological Descriptions of 

 Minute Bodies made by Magnifying Glasses, with Observations and Inquiries 

 thereupon," published in 1665, treats so interestingly of the life-history of the 

 mosquito that we quote from it at some length. He calls the larva 



"... a small scaled or crusted animal which I have often observed to be gen- 

 erated in Rain water. ... It is supposed by some, to deduce its first original 

 from the putrifaction of Rain-water, in which, if it have stood any time open to 

 the air you shall seldom miss, all the Summer long, of store of them striking 

 to and fro." 



A description of the larva follows, with constant reference to the plate, with 

 its crude but characteristic figures, and observations on the internal structure 

 and the circulation of the " bloud." Its mouth was " pretty large " and " con- 

 trived like those of Crabs and Lobsters, by which, I have often observed them to 

 feed on the water, or upon some imperceptible nutritive substance in it " 



" Both its motion and rest is very strange and pleasant . . . for, where it 

 ceases from moving its body, the tail of it seeming much lighter then the rest of 

 its body, and a little lighter then the water it swims in, presently boys it up to 

 the top . . . where it hangs suspended with the head always downward. . . . 

 the hanging of these in this posture, put me in mind of a certain creature I have 

 seen in London that was brought out of America, which would very firmly sus- 



