SUMMER NUMBER 5 
specimens wherever possible. Every school child will then be 
able to know whether or not mosquitoes are breeding anywhere 
about the home. 
The children should be provided with adequate equipment for 
this work. How many school children have insect nets? (Insect 
nets, inexpensive and easily made by the children themselves, for 
collecting in both water and air, were demonstrated.) Here is 
a weapon with which anyone can sweep up all the mosquitoes in 
aroom inafew minutes. I have saved many a night’s sleep with 
this simple device and have promised myself never to be without 
one in my future journeys in Florida. With our insect damage 
tax of over $1,500,000,000 annually every child ought to have and 
use the insect net during some part of every year of his school 
course. 
Loftin, in the articles referred to, has described mosquito traps 
that may help in the solution of our problem. These traps are 
black or dark boxes or crocks set in favorable places about 
porches and are designed to take advantage of the instinct of 
mosquitoes to hide in dark holes during daylight, and considerable 
numbers might be trapped in this way. But we may be pardoned 
for asking whether the providing and daily tending of these traps 
might not entail more expense and labor than the entire work of 
doing away with the breeding places. These traps, too, seem to 
me to be lacking somewhat in definite attracting power. Are 
there not always too many other dark places in the dense foliage 
of trees, weed patches, vines and shrubbery—known to be the 
natural hiding places of mosquitoes? And could we hope by 
any arrangement of such traps to catch but comparatively few 
of the entire number about the premises ?* 
In making my experiments upon trapping stable flies I think 
I have caught at least as many mosquitoes in a single night in a 
single stable window trap as Loftin caught in all his traps in a 
year. Of course they happened to be there to catch that night, 
and no real comparison with the Loftin traps is intended. In 
this case a cow just inside the window supplied adequate attrac- 
tion. In regions where extensive natural breeding places cannot 
be drained, filled or oiled, or stocked with fishes, such traps might 
readily be designed to catch all the mosquitoes that were attract- 
ed to house or stable windows, the occupants serving as “bait” 
but in no danger of being bitten. The traps would not be ex- 
*As we understand it, Loftin’s traps were intended only for use in closed rooms 
and exposed porches where natural hiding places for mosquitoes are few or 
absent.—Ed. 
