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mosquito-destroying animals. Flying at dusk and after dark 

 and capturing all flying insects upon the wing, they devour 

 large numbers of adult mosquitoes in times of mosquito preva- 

 lence." It is further stated in the same place that the suggestion 

 has been made by Mr. A. C. Weeks, of Brooklyn, that an 

 attempt be made to breed bats artificially on account of their 

 importance as mosquito destroyers. I cannot remember the 

 earliest date on which Mr. Weeks made this suggestion to me, 

 but he has done it many times on occasions of my annual visits 

 to Brooklyn, which began in 1894 and continued until recently. 

 In the same place attention was called to- the building of a bat- 

 breeding house near San Antonio, Texas, by Dr. Charles A. R. 

 Campbell of that city, whose idea was that the bats would 

 become sufficiently numerous in this special nesting place to rid 

 the neighborhood of night-flying mosquitoes, calling attention 

 to the fact that the expense of the building would be more than 

 paid by the collecton of the resulting bat guano. 



Previous to the publication of the Carnegie Monograph there 

 had appeared a privately printed pamphlet by Edward Cecil 

 Bessellieu, of Charleston, S. C, in 1906, in which he urged the 

 construction of bat roosts for the purpose of doing away with 

 mosquitoes and malaria. He wrote, "Nature's plea to man is 

 in this connection 'Build and maintain bateries,' encourage the; 

 bat to multiply and release him in malarious localities, and find 

 'surcease of sorrow.' " 



In 1 910 D'r. Charles A. R. Campbell, of San Antonio, Texas, 

 who had been corresponding with me for a number of years 

 about other matters, sent me a long article on the practical use 

 of bats in ridding a locality of malaria, and wrote me at the 

 same time that he proposed to make the study of bats his life's 

 work, that he advanced the idea, of cultivating bats on account 

 of their insect-destroying qualities more than ten years previ- 

 ously, but that two years before (1908) he gained the idea of 

 the commercial element of gathering the guano collecting at a 

 specially constructed roost. This idea he got by watching bats 

 defecate and weighing the product. His idea was that the 



