chapter Yl 



W 



E ARE fond of saying that circumstances have conspired 

 to bring about such-and-such a result, and surely a series of 

 different things led me naturally to take a great interest in the 

 subject of the insect carriers of disease. There were plenty of 

 mosquitoes at Ithaca, and long before I read Reaumur's fascinat- 

 ing account of the development of the common rain-water mos- 

 quito at Paris in the middle of the i8th century, someone had 

 told me that the little wrigglers in buckets of rainwater and in 

 horse troughs were young mosquitoes. I had not only studied 

 their transformations out of mere curiosity, but I had found that 

 in this aquatic stage they were readily killed by pouring a few 

 drops of kerosene on the surface of the water. But of course I 

 was only a boy, and mentioned it only to my boy friends. 



When I came to Washington I developed a slight case of 

 malaria. I consulted a physician, who told me that it was due 

 to my open windows at night — that the miasma came in from 

 the Potomac flats. I shut the windows, took quinine, and got 

 well. But I never had the slightest suspicion that there was any 

 such thing as an Anopheles mosquito. Mosquitoes were bad 

 in most places in those days. The New Jersey coast one was at 

 the height of its reputation, and I remember that it was almost 



[ii6] 



