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purposes, and that means the borough is to be freed from 

 ■mosquito breeding. 



We have heard a good deal of talking from: those who have 

 operated in the tropics, in the Philippines and Panama, who said, 

 "Why can't you do there what we have done down in the 

 tropics?" I don't know whether any of you ever had to make 

 inspections of such areas as are involved in the City of New 

 York, and to realize the extent to which local home-bred mos- 

 quitoes may be produced in apparently ideal sanitary environ- 

 ments, when you have an area that is perfectly equipped with 

 sewers, that has concrete cellar foundations, and stone construc- 

 tion, and paved streets, and, in, other words, perfectly equipped. 

 If you go into a block of that kind of ideal sanitary conditions, 

 well lighted, well aired, good sewers, and you find a dozen breed- 

 ing places for mosquitoes, you wonder how on earth your 

 corps of sixty or seventy odd inspectors can cover the metro- 

 politan area of New York. 



We have not found any way, so far, of covering our area 

 so as to be sure mosquito breeding is not continuing, and so we 

 are falling back upon the educational propaganda that can be 

 started by such an interstate mosquito committee, so that every- 

 body who comes to New York from Westchester, New Jersey 

 or Long Island, puts in his little interest to look outside of his 

 windows to see whether his own gutter is full of water and 

 breeding mosquitoes, whether the man who looks down from the 

 thirty-fifth story on acres and acres of roofs will notice whether 

 there is a mosquito-breeding area in sight, so that the man who 

 is confined to town for the summer will be interested in his 

 neighbor's back yard. Do you realize that a newspaper may 

 start , mosquito breeding? If you take a newspaper and drop it 

 into your neighbor's yard, you will find it may obstruct com- 

 pletely the exit of the yard drain. That is not a thing a man who 

 leaves his premises in June can be held responsible for, ob- 

 structed yard drains. Those are the things that permit breeding 

 of mosquitoes in enormous numbers in New York City. You get 

 a home in Riverside Drive, and an area where the death rate 

 is down to nine per one thousand, a very low record for a city 



