TRANSFORMATION OF MOSQUITO 21 
pend it self by the tail . . . and was said to sleep in that posture, with her 
young ones in her false belly. . . .” 
He kept some in a glass of rain-water and observed their transformation to 
pupa and adult and described the pupa, and also, very accurately, the emergence 
of the adult. He philosophizes: 
_ “Thave been the more particular, and large in the relation of the transforma- 
tion of divers of these little Animals which I observed, because I have not found 
that any Authour has observ’d the like; and because the thing it self is so strange 
and heterogeneous from the usual progress of other Animals, that I judge it may 
not onely be pleasant, but very usefull and necessary toward the completing of 
Natural History.” 
He speculates upon what he has seen, and wonders if, after all, the varied 
organisms supposed to come from putrefaction may not develop from eggs 
dropped in the water by the parent. He had an idea that the gnat’s eggs might 
possibly be ejected in the air—*. . . for it seems not very improbable, but that 
those small seeds of Gnats may (being, perhaps, of so light a nature and having 
so great a proportion of surface to so small a bulk of body) be ejected into the 
Air, and so, perhaps, carried for a good while too and fro in it, till by the drops 
of Rain it be washed out of it.” He believes, speaking of metamorphoses of 
insects, that were men “ diligent observers, they might meet with multitudes ” 
of instances. 
He describes, in another place, a female mosquito, and speaks of letting it bite 
his hand, and of watching its body swell with the blood, 
“ making it appear very red and transparent, and this without further pain than 
whilst it was sinking in its proboscis . . . a good argument that these creatures 
do not wound the skin and suck the blood out of enmity and revenge, but for 
meer necessity and to satisfy their hunger.” 
The copper plates of Hooke’s work were republished with new text by an 
anonymous writer in 1745, under the title “ Micrographia Restaurata.” The 
self-satisfied complacency of this edition is in sharp contrast to the intimate 
style of the original work. It alternately apologizes for Hooke’s short-comings 
and exalts the present-day perfection of scientific knowledge, brevity and direct- 
ness of speech. Under our treatment of the mosquito larva the accounts of 
Swammerdamm, Réaumur and Hooke are mentioned. The unknown com- 
mentator, however, draws upon the paper by J. J. Wagner, “ De Generatione 
Culicum ” (Ephem. Acad. Nat. Curios., 1684), for his description of the life- 
history. This account, which in reality treats of one of the Chironomide, states 
that the female gnat dips its tail into the water and lays a gelatinous mass of 
eggs attached to a water weed—that they hatch into small reddish maggots which 
sink to the bottom of the water, where they form cases in which they live for a 
time and later come forth and become pup and mosquitoes. 
John Swammerdamm, in his Historia Insectorum Generalis, Utrecht, 1669 
(in English in Book of Nature, London, 1758, pp. 153-159), shows plainly that 
he had carefully studied mosquitoes with the microscope, and describes the larva 
very carefully (complimenting Robert Hooke’s admirable figures in his Micro- 
