INTRODUCTION 



SOME years ago I was visiting- a family in the moun- 

 tains. It was during a dry season, and water was 

 scarce. There were no swamps, no lakes or pools, 

 and the drinking-water was taken from springs ; yet mos- 

 quitoes were so plentiful that it was necessary to screen 

 the porches, that sitting out of an evening might be made 

 possible. I asked where the water came from in which 

 they washed their clothes, and they replied, as expected, 

 " From a rain-water tank," which, as it happened, was sit- 

 uated under the porch. I investigated the tank and found 

 it literally alive with mosquito larvae. A i3int of kero- 

 sene stopped the breeding, and as the water was drawn 

 from a faucet near the bottom of the tank the kerosene 

 did not injure it. 



The indifference of this family as to the source of their 

 local mosquito pest, or rather their combined ignorance 

 of and indifference to the subject of the breeding-places, 

 was at that time — and it was not so very long ago — char- 

 acteristic of people in general. It was my good fortune, 

 through the wide-spread newspaper accounts of my kero- 

 sene experiments in the Catskill Mountains in 1892, to 

 become more or less identified with many practical experi- 

 ments in the destruction of mosquitoes from that time 

 on. Interest in the subject became very great, especially 



