22 THE FLORIDA BUGGIST 
THE ANOPHELES MOSQUITO IN RELATION TO MALARIA 
AND AGRICULTURE 
(Continued from page 19) 
This has in a brief way served to illustrate the relation of 
the mosquito to malaria and so brings us to the second part of 
the evening’s topic, the relation to Agriculture. 
Generally speaking, I doubt if this side of the question has 
scarcely attracted your attention, yet if you stop a moment to 
consider the enormous losses in crops and waste of uninhabited 
land due to malaria, the results are amazing. 
A beginning along this line was made by Herrick in 1903 
when he showed that in the Southern United States the effect 
of malaria was retarding the development of the country and 
rendering practically uninhabited some of the most fertile 
regions of the world, namely, the great Mississippi delta. 
A more accurate estimate was made in 1909 when Dr. L. O. 
Howard placed the annual money loss from’ malaria in the 
United States at not less than $100,000,000. 
This seemed to cause an awakening of the Bureau of Ento- 
mology and as a result Mr. D. L. Van Dine has been stationed 
for the past few years at Mound, La., and Mr. James K. Thi- 
bault, Jr., at Scott, Arkansas. The results of their observations 
were published in the Southern Medical Journal for March, 
1915, and I will briefly give a review of their results. 
It is generally known that the Anopheles mosquito larvae 
thrive best in shallow margins of swamps, ponds, slow moving 
streams, grass grown springs, and land locked pools, or in other 
words the abundance of the mosquito in a region is in direct 
proportion to the extent of water collections. 
Malaria, unlike yellow fever, is of rural origin, and decreases 
in proportion to the decrease of natural collections of surface 
water; that is as large areas of land have been drained and 
brought under cultivation, thus destroying the breeding places 
for the mosquito. Malaria has decreased in direct ratio to the 
amount of decrease in surface water. 
If a map. of the United States was made to locate the 
Swamps, undrained lands and lands subject to overflow, you 
would find that you would also indicate: 
(1) Regions known to be malarial; 
(2) Areas which include the distribution of one or more 
species of mosquitoes that transmit malaria; 
(3) The most fertile lands in the United States; 
