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upon Mr. Wonfor for the lucid way in which he had placed the hairs 
of caterpillars before the Society at their last meeting. He also inci- 
dentally referred to the fact of the paper having been reported, and 
mentioned that he had availed himself of this means to send a copy 
of it to a friend—an entomologist of no mean order—who had since 
cordially thanked him for calling his attention to a matter which had 
hitherto escaped his notice, but which had been dealt with in such an 
interesting and masterly style by Mr. Wonfor. 
“Mr. WonFor then introduced the question, “Gnats or Mos- 
quitos ”—a subject which was creating some interest in London and 
elsewhere. That afternoon his wife read a paragraph in one of the 
papers about a visitation of mosquitos on Plumstead Marshes. In 1868, 
the good people of Plumstead Marshes, Woolwich, and Portsea, near 
Portsmouth, in a similar way cried out terribly about a visitation of 
mosquitos, and exactly the same misrepresentations concerning the 
visitors appeared in the public press then as now. He thought, under 
these circumstances, he might set some of those outside right in regard 
to the creature that had been stinging them. It was undoubtedly the 
English mosquito, and it was not a creature that had come over from 
the East Indies or South America, either in the egg or larval state, on 
the sails of ships. The life-history of the creature would prove that it 
was nothing more nor less than one of the twenty or twenty-five 
English gnats that we possessed, 
The insect in the larval and chrysalis state lived in the water, and 
the-only period of its life passed in the air was as the perfect insect, 
the gnat or the mosquito. They would, therefore, see how impossible 
it was for a mosquito of South America, spending nineteen-twentieths 
of its existence in the water, to come over in the larval state, on the 
sail of a ship, especially when it was stated that few gnats lived longer 
than a week. It seemed that, whenever we had a very hot summer, 
the bloodthirsty instinct of the female English gnat, or mosquito, was 
intensified, so that it was led to attack man with far greater vigour than 
in an ordinary summer. When they considered the millions of gnats 
that were to be seen flying over a large river just as they had escaped 
from the pupal state, it was not to be wondered at that such places as 
Plumstead Marshes and Portsea, having large expanses. of water 
near them, should be largely visited by these insects. Specimens of 
the Plumstead or Portsea mosquito sent to him by friends were found 
to be identical with the cudex pipiens, or ordinary English gnat. These 
