20 MOSQUITOES OF NORTH AMERICA 
EARLY ACCOUNTS OF THE BIOLOGY AND STRUCTURE OF 
MOSQUITOES. 
Although simple lenses were known in very ancient times, and although many 
interesting and important observations were made with these simple lenses, it 
was not until the invention of the compound microscope, at the end of the six- 
teenth century and its development during the seventeenth century, that com- 
petent observations began to be made upon the very small animals. In that 
century, and especially towards its close, a number of patient workers examined 
with these new instruments the small, common forms of life about them and 
discovered many most interesting and, to them, almost miraculous facts con- 
cerning their microscopic appearance and concerning their habits and methods 
of life. 
The organization of the proboscis of the mosquito and its manner of function- 
ing were the objects of especial interest to the early investigators with lens and 
microscope. The work of some of these anatomists, when we consider the in- 
struments at their command, was most remarkable, and while faulty in the light 
of our present knowledge, gives testimony to the enthusiasm and devotion of 
these men. It would lead too far to enter into a discussion of the early investi- 
gators. A brief account of them, and their relation, to the facts as found by 
modern workers, is given by Dimmock, while Meinert, in his “ Fluernes Mund- 
dele,” gives a very complete account of these early researches on the composition 
of the mosquito’s proboscis. There were naturally enough discrepancies as to 
the component parts of the proboscis, but Swammerdamm, in his work of 1669, 
had already determined them correctly. 
Many of the earlier works, like Barth’s “ De Culice dissertatio,” contain little 
that is original, but quote, as was then the fashion, at great length from the 
writings of ancient authors. 
Robert Hooke, in his “ Micrographia, or Some Physiological Descriptions of 
Minute Bodies made by Magnifying Glasses, with Observations and Inquiries 
thereupon,” published in 1665, treats so interestingly of the life-history of the 
mosquito that we quote from it at some length. He calls the larva 
“. . . a small scaled or crusted animal which I have often observed to be gen- 
erated in Rain water. . . . It is supposed by some, to deduce its first original 
from the putrifaction of Rain-water, in which, if it have stood any time open to 
the air you shall seldom miss, all the Summer long, of store of them striking 
to and fro.” 
its body, and a little lighter then the water it swims in, presently boys it up to 
the top 2 . . where it hangs suspended with the head swage dee a . 
the hanging of these in this posture, put me in mind of a certain creature I have 
seen in London that was brought out of America, which would very firmly sus- 
