TRANSFORMATIOX OF MOSQUITO 21 



pend it self by the tail . . . and was said to sleep in that posture, with her 

 young ones in her false belly. . . ." 



He kept some in a glass of rain-water and observed their transformation to 

 pupa and adult and described the pupa, and also, very accurately, the emergence 

 of the adult. He philosophizes : 



" I have been the more particular, and large in the relation of the transforma- 

 tion of divers of these little Animals which I observed, because I have not found 

 that any Authour has observ'd the like ; and because the thing it self is so strange 

 and heterogeneous from the usual progress of other Animals, that I judge it may 

 not onely be pleasant, but very usefull and necessary toward the completing of 

 N'atural History." 



He speculates upon what he has seen, and wonders if, after all, the varied 

 organisms supposed to come from putrefaction may not develop from eggs 

 dropped in the water by the parent. He had an idea that the gnat's eggs might 

 possibly be ejected in the air — " ... for it seems not very improbable, but that 

 those small seeds of Gnats may (being, perhaps, of so light a nature and having 

 so great a proportion of surface to so small a bulk of body) be ejected into the 

 Air, and so, perhaps, carried for a good while too and fro in it, till by the drops 

 of Eain it be washed out of it." He believes, speaking of metamorphoses of 

 insects, that were men " diligent observers, they might meet with multitudes " 

 of instances. 



He describes, in another place, a female mosquito, and speaks of letting it bite 

 his hand, and of watching its body swell with the blood, 



" making it appear very red and transparent, and this without further pain than 

 whilst it was sinking in its proboscis ... a good argument that these creatures 

 do not wound the slcin and suck the blood out of enmity and revenge, but for 

 meer necessity and to satisfy their hunger." 



Tlie copper plates of Hooke's work were republished with new text by an 

 anonymous writer in 1745, under the title " Micrographia Eestaurata." The 

 self-satisfied complacency of this edition is in sharp contrast to the intimate 

 style of the original work. It alternately apologizes for Hooke's short-comings 

 and exalts the present-day perfection of scientific knowledge, brevity and direct- 

 ness of speech. Under our treatment of the mosquito larva the accounts of 

 Swammerdamm, Eeaumur and Hooke are mentioned. The unknown com- 

 mentator, however, draws upon the paper by J. J. Wagner, " De Generatione 

 Culicum" (Ephem. Acad. Nat. Curios., 1684), for his description of the life- 

 history. This account, which in reality treats of one of the Chironomidas, states 

 that the female gnat dips its tail into the water and lays a gelatinous mass of 

 eggs attached to a water weed — that they hatch into small reddish maggots which 

 sink to the bottom of the water, where they form cases in which they live for a 

 time and later come forth and become pupas and mosquitoes. 



John Swammerdamm, in his Historia Insectorum Generalis, Utrecht, 1669 

 (in English in Book of Nature, London, 1758, pp. 153-159), shows plainly that 

 he had carefully studied mosquitoes with the microscope, and describes the larva 

 very carefully (complimenting Eobert Hooke's admirable figures in his Micro- 



