MOSQUITOES AND FLIES 



Mosquitoes 



The mosquitoes, perhaps more than any other noxious 

 insect, impel us to ask the impertinent question, why 

 pests were made to annoy us. It would be well enough to 

 answer that they were given as a test of the efficiency of 

 our science in learning how to control them, if it were not 

 for the other creatures, the wild animals, whose existence 

 must be at times a continual torment from the bites of 

 insects and from the diseases transmitted by them. Such 

 creatures must endure their tortures without hope of relief, 

 and there is ample evidence of the suffering that insects 

 cause them. 



In earlier and more primitive days the rainwater barrel 

 and the town watering trough took the place of the course 

 in nature study in our present-day schools. While the 

 lessons of the water barrel and the trough were perhaps 

 not exact or thoroughly scientific, we at least got our 

 learning from them at first hand. We all knew then what 

 "wigglers" and "horsehair snakes" were; and we knew 

 that the former turned into mosquitoes as surely as we 

 believed that the latter came from horsehairs. Modern 

 nature study has set us upon the road to more exact 

 science, but the aquarium can never hold the mysteries 

 of the old horse trough or the marvels of the rainwater 

 barrel. 



The supposed ancestry of the horsehair snake is now an 

 exploded myth, but the advance of science has unfortu- 

 nately not altered the fact that wigglers turn into mos- 

 quitoes, except in so far as the spread of applied sanita- 

 tion has brought it about that fewer of them than for- 

 merly succeed in doing so. And now, as we leave the 

 homely objects of our first acquaintance with "wigglers" 

 for the more convenient apparatus of the laboratory, we 

 will call the creatures mosquito larvae, since that is what 

 they are. 



The rainwater barrel never told us how those wiggling 



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