vi INTRODUCTION 



among" summer residents of the country, and especially 

 near the sea-shore, even before the ag-ency of mosquitoes 

 in the sjiread of disease became established, and before 

 it became a g-enerally accepted fact. With the very per- 

 fect proof that the mosquitoes of the genus Anopheles are 

 instrumental in the carriage of malaria, the interest be- 

 came intensified, and the late discovery of our Army 

 Yellow-fever Commission in Cuba, that a mosquito is the 

 conveyor of yellow fever, has added to the general interest 

 in the subject. In fact, the whole mosquito question is a 

 live topic of the da3^ Knowledge of mosquito habits is 

 more general than at any previous time, and almost everj^- 

 one is interested in the subject of mosquito extermina- 

 tion. With the knowledge which we now possess, it 

 seems almost incredible that people should all these 

 years have suffered, more or less i3atiently, the torment- 

 ing bites of Culex and the insidious but more dangerous 

 punctures of Anopheles without making the slightest ef- 

 fort to abate the nuisance and the danger, bej^ond slap- 

 ping, in a revengeful way, at individual biters. In many 

 places infested with mosquitoes nothing could be easier 

 than to put a stop to the whole tormenting plague. In 

 many other cases the problem is a more difficult one, but 

 in even the worst cases, by a judicious effort, which 

 should be a community effort, and by the expenditure of 

 a greater or smaller amount of monej% much relief can be 

 gained. In fact, Mr. W. J. Matheson, of New York, was 

 quite right when, in the summer of 1900, just before com- 

 mencing a successful crusade against the mosquitoes on 

 the north shore of Long Island, he wrote me that there 



