THE COMMON MOSQUITO 67 



was not well known at an even earlier date. The French 

 observer, Reaumur, studied the same species more than 

 150 years ago, near Paris, and his account of the devel- 

 opment of Culex has remained standard from that time 

 almost to the present day. The full life history of no 

 American species of Culex, however, was published until 

 1896, when the life history of Culex puwjens Wiedemann 

 was worked out by the writer at Washington and pub- 

 lished in Bulletin 4, n. s., of the Division of Entomolog-y, 

 of the United States Department of Agriculture. 



Fig. C. — Egg Mass of Culex imngens ; enlarged; with individual eggs, 

 still more enlarged, at left. (Author's illustration.) 



Culex pungens is one of our common North American 

 species. It abounds everywhere, from the White Moun- 

 tains of New Hampshire down into Central America, and 

 is, perhaps, the most abundant of our mosquitoes. It 

 breeds exclusively in fresh water, and its larvae may 

 everyw^here be found in water buckets and barrels, in 

 transient pools of rain-w^ater, in fresh-water swamps, along 

 the borders of inland lakes and ponds, and, in fact, in all 

 of the out of the Avay places which have been mentioned 

 in Chapter I. Its life history may be taken as typical of 

 the genus Culex, all other species probably closely re- 



