378 AGRICULTURAL EXPERIMENT STATION. 



SPECIES FOUND IN ELIZABETH. 



It is my conviction that mosquito extermination will not be successfully 

 prosecuted in any locality without the employment of intelligent labor. That 

 is, there must first be an identification of the species in the larval state 

 to know best how to treat them, and second, the men who spray the oil 

 should be trained to know if the water is infested with mosquitoes before 

 they proceed to treat it, else there will be a waste of time and material, 

 because a man who is wholly ignorant of the presence of an object he is 

 sent forth to kill cannot best serve the ends for which he is employed, and 

 the possibilities are that he may do quite as much harm as good, because 

 he is working in the dark. 



I have found eight different species in this locality during the season 

 and have mounted them in their larval state in microscopical slides, which 

 will make future identification of these species quite simple. They are as 

 follows : 



Ciilex canadensis* Culex pipiens, 



Culex ferritans, Culex sollicitans. 



Culex can tans, Culex sylvestris, 



Psorophora ciliata, Anopheles punctipennis. 



Professor Smith, the State Entomologist, has had a man on these 

 meadows all summer, and the remarkable and interesting results of this 

 study of the salt marshes will be shown in a map later in this report. 

 Professor Smith has made an interesting discovery regarding the laying of 

 the eggs of ths species. Upon the occasion of one of my visits to his 

 laboratories in New Brunswick last summer, he gave me a piece of the 

 dried mud, or sod, cut from the meadows several weeks before and asked 

 me to place it in water after I reached home and watch results. This 

 I did, and in less than twenty-four hours the water was swarming with 

 larv£e of sollicitans. This means that the eggs are laid in the mud and 

 will lie there probably an indefinite period of time, until submerged with 

 water of the proper temperature to hatch out the larvae. Professor Smith 

 justly claims that this fact will become an important factor in the methods 

 employed for the destruction of sollicitans. As the sollicitans do not breed 

 anywhere, except upon the salt marshes, but one method of extermination 

 need be applied to them^that of drainage, and an examination of the map 

 on page 17 will show how easily that may be accomplished, since every in- 

 fested spot is close to a running stream. 



Current literature has come to speak of malaria as the product of the 

 Anopheles mosquitoes, but this statement lacks scientific accuracy, since the 

 name applies to, at least, two different species — the punctipennis and maculi- 

 pennis. The latter, without doubt, is the source of malaria, i. e., the mac- 

 ulipennis acts as an " intermediate host " for the development of the ma- 

 larial parasite, when this mosquito sucks the blood from a patient suffering 

 with malaria, but it has not yet been proven that the punctipennis serves 

 the same purpose in the development of this germ, and it is the punctipennis 

 only that we found in this locality. 



I cannot, in this brief report, go into a discussion of the relation of mos- 

 quitoes to m'alaria, but will refer those who may wish to read what the 

 medical scientists of the world have to say on this subject to two articles 

 in the report of the Smithsonian Institute for 1900, by Dr. George M. Stern- 

 berg, Surgeon-General, United States Army. 



The theory, shorn of all its technicalities and boiled down to a simple 

 statement, is that it is impossible to get true malaria without being bitten 

 by the mosquito Anopheles maculipennis, and further, that this mosquito can 

 not transmit malaria to you unless -it has previously drawn blood from a 

 malarial patient. The parasite passes with the human blood into the mos- 



Descriptions are omitted. 



