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Albany, 1885, although antedating the recent important mosquito dis- 
coveries, is well worth reading by all public-minded persons, and the 
annual reports of the State geologist of New Jersey for 1897 and 1898, 
in which the reclamation of the great Hackensack Meadows, near Jersey 
City, Newark, and Elizabeth, N. J., makes interesting reading along 
this line. Work on these marshes has actually been begun. The 
solution of this case is taking the form of separate action by cities and 
their municipalities, each improving the territory within its corporate 
limits. The city of Newark has a tract of 4,600 acres of marsh within 
its limits; Jersey City has within its limits 2,086 acres of tide marsh, 
and Elizabeth has 2,658 acres. The three cities, therefore, have about 
8,700 acres of the 27,000 acres lying between Elizabeth and Hacken- 
sack. The sanitary importance of reclaiming these lands is of the 
greatest, but the capabilities of the improvement plans are attracting 
attention on the part of capitalists and business men, who see in these 
tide lands valuable sites for manufacturing, industrial, and commercial 
activity. 
Even to individual land owners of a community, the drainage of 
swamps and the consequent abolition of mosquitoes will in many cases 
become well worth while. The writer knows of a town in New Jersey, 
with a good elevation, within easy distance of New York, and admirably 
adapted for summer residences of New Yorkers, where the mosquitoes 
are so abundant as to prevent the rise in the price of real estate. An 
examination of the surrounding country has convinced him that if the 
large real estate owners were to club together they might, by the 
expenditure of a few thousand dollars, largely do away with the mos- 
quito plague. Another case which is well worth specific mention, and 
the truth of which the writer will vouch for, may best be told in the 
words of a correspondent, printed in one of the Flushing papers late 
in March: 
In the town of Stratford, Conn., where I have resided for the past forty-five years, 
we have been greatly plagued by swarms of mosquitoes, so great, in fact, that the 
‘‘Stratford mosquito’’ became a well-known characteristic of Stratford. We have in 
the southern part of our town, bordering on the sound, several acres of marsh land 
or meadow, which would become periodically overflowed with water in the summer 
and a tremendous breeding ground for mosquitoes, and this plague to the town con- 
tinued until about 1890-91, when a party from Bridgeport, Conn., purchased a large 
section of the meadows and began to protect them by a dike, both on the north and 
south ends, which shut out the water. In addition to this, numerous drain ditches 
were made, which helped to carry the water away. The result of this work made 
the land perfectly dry and spongy, so that after a rain no pools collected on the sur- 
face of the meadow and prevented the creation of the mosquitoes. The transforma- 
tion was so remarkable that people outside the town would hardly believe that it 
had been effected, and a year or two later the town voted a special appropriation of 
$2,000 to the party who undertook to build the dike and render the meadows mos- 
quito proof. It had also the effect of placing on the market a large tract of land 
elevated from the sound for residences, and as many as 25 summer residences have 
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