Proceedings of Eighth Annual Meeting 



19 



Navigation Board asked to hurry along its Inland waterway from 

 the Highlands to Cape May. 

 All this would help a little. 



Experience teaches that the struggling upward trend of progress 

 is the fruitage of patient plodding. Our progress is more or less 

 round and round in a circle but always in an upward spiral. Our 

 problems are all perpetual. 



Our difficulties are not overcome by separate or single achieve- 

 ments. Primitive men still have to lasso those wild horses, still have 

 to educate them to bit and saddle, still have to remember the perils 

 of horsemenship. 



With the advance progress we have made since the launching of 

 the first canoe, yet shipwreck and perils of the sea cry out for pre- 

 cautionary measures — so with all our inventive enterprises; the 

 aeroplane, the ventilating of tunnels, the fireproofiing of buildings, 

 safety appliances in transportation, railroad or motor vehicle — yet 

 the new situation is set about with new difficulties, and we all carry 

 accident insurance. 



Our work was scoffed at in former times, is yet, and even attempts 

 to thwart it are made by those who should know better. Editorial 

 note and comment and news items adverse to our program repeatedly 

 appeared and while it was thought a good work was being accom- 

 plished in dredging the meadows, yet so much of the county appro- 

 priations went into this sink hole that the habitable portions of the 

 county received practically no relief from the mosquitoes bred in the 

 small pools, open ditches and marshy places of the uplands. 



But we kept at it. We pegged away with such funds as we had, 

 ■ditching meadows and swamps, filling pools, setting up apparatus to 

 oil breeding places and incidentally educating the public to help itself 

 by the elimination of incubators in back yards, rain barrels and tin 

 cans. 



Years ago the subject of the New Jersey Mosquito was a rich 

 theme for paragraph writers, cartoonists, and self-styled humorists. 



Today the mosquito work isn't news. They've always been fight- 

 ing mosquitoes. The subject is casually talked about as one talks 

 about the weather. But there is nothing unusual in this, it's the way 

 of the world — things common place and trite. 



Even our conventions receive but scant attention. 



All great movements are subject to abuse. John F. Stevens, 

 •one time Chief Engineer of the Isthmian Canal Commission, wrote 

 as follows : 



