Proceedings of Seventh Annual Meeting 65 



ping all movement of tide water on many acres of ditched meadow^s. 

 Ditches on the meadows south of Great Bay were nearly as bad, 

 except that the outlets of ditches facing northeast were plugged while 

 the ditches running northwest and southeast were filled along the 

 entire length. Almost as much time was spent on these two meadows 

 as on all of the remaining ditched areas. There is no reason why we 

 should again have the same trouble with these ditches. 



One ditching machine was again started in July and the other in 

 September, and by December first we had installed 323,672 feet of 

 10 by 30-inch ditches and 62,627 feet of 7 by 20-inch spur ditches, 

 or a total of 386,299 feet for the year. This makes a grand total of 

 6,254,413 feet of ditches installed on the Atlantic County meadows 

 since 1913, covering 20,717 acres, or about 64 per cent of the known 

 breeding meadows. 



The ditching accomplished was not up to expectations and can be 

 accounted for by our having to use the machine gangs for spring 

 cleaning and also by the time consumed in boat trips to reach the 

 meadows on which we are working. The actual working hours 

 were reduced to about six per day. 



The first breeding of A. cantator was found on March 6 and 

 again in the middle of April. This breeding was quite heavy in the 

 coves along the bottoms that had been choked with sod and seaweed 

 carried in by the high tides. It took very little cleaning to prevent 

 the maturing of this brood and but few were found on the wing. 



A. sollicitans first made their appearance on the undrained 

 meadows on the twenty-third of May and on the twenty-fifth were 

 carried on a west wind to the north side of Atlantic City and 

 Chelsea. These were accompanied by an immense number of crane 

 flies, fish flies and gnats and stayed with us for three days. A great 

 many people, being bitten by the gnats and seeing the crane flies, 

 came to the conclusion that we were experiencing an unusual brood 

 of large mosquitoes and it brought forth some criticism. As one 

 prominent citizen said, we, the Mosquito Extermination Commis- 

 sion, were causing the abnormal growth of mosquitoes by our dig- 

 ging such deep ditches in the meadows. The mosquitoes needed 

 longer legs to get out. 



On June twenty-second a small brood of sollicitans emerged, but 

 favorable winds carried them away from the thickly populated parts 

 of the county. Two broods emerged in July, one on the eighth and 



