14 N. J. Mosquito Extermination Association 



learned that Dr. Howard had recently delivered a lecture there on 

 "Mosquitoes and Mosquito Extermination." I came back, called a 

 number of my neighbors together and said, ''Gentlemen, I have found 

 somebody who can talk an hour on mosquitoes. He is the head of 

 the Bureau of Entomology in Washington, and I want you to let me 

 have him come here. We will hire a hall, post the town with bul- 

 letins, and begin a campaign of education against the mosquito." 

 "Well," they said, "all right ; you go ahead." We hired the hall and 

 we brought Dr. Howard. 



I met him at the station with horse and buggy and he said he 

 would like to look around the town before evening. So I took him 

 not far from my house and as we neared a small piece of woods, 

 the horse became so covered with mosquitoes that it was hardly 

 possible to recognize his color. They were something frightful. 

 Then Dr. Howard said, "Let's stop right here." So we got out and 

 walked over perhaps one hundred and fifty feet to a little pool of 

 water. "Yes," he said, "they are here." I said, "Those are wrig- 

 glers." "Surely," he answered. "Will they make mosquitoes?" 

 "Yes." "For heaven's sake, I have seen those in rain-barrels all my 

 life." "Yes," said he, "and this pond is big enough to give you all 

 that you require for this neighborhood." 



Well, at our meeting that night the hall was packed. The New 

 York papers sent their reporters, for it was a splendid chance to 

 have a lot of fun at our expense and the next day each paper had 

 about a column on the meeting. For instance, the New York Sun 

 said that the fresh-water mosquito is humpbacked, but the malarial 

 kind has a Grecian bend. I ran the stereopticon for Dr. Howard's 

 lecture, and the applause was enormous and scattering. But the 

 difficulty was to know which was applause and which was a mos- 

 quito being killed, for that hall was simply filled with mosquitoes. 

 It was just slap, slap, slap. 



That was in the spring of 1901. From that day to this South 

 Orange has been at work eliminating the breeding places of mos- 

 quitoes. I think that we ought to feel very proud that the first 

 clarion call to get at it came from Washington, and the first news- 

 paper announcement of the beginning of a genuine campaign in the 

 State of New Jersey was the record of Dr. Howard's address. 



Dr. Howard has hundreds of interests aside from this one. For 

 nearly twenty-five years he has been the secretary of the American 

 Association for the Advancement of Science, the leading scientific 



