N. J. Mosquito Extermination Association 9 



persons. Compare this with the resuhs of our mosquito control 

 work all over the state, which brought the number of cases down 

 to 83 in 1 92 1, or a loss of $24,900.00. This saved for the state 

 over $200,000.00 in permanent wealth-producing power in 1921. 

 In fact, it is more than this amount, as the population is larger in 

 1 92 1 than 19 14. The constant reductions in malarial cases from 

 771 in 191 4 to 83 in 1921 have added not less than a million dol- 

 lars to the permanent wealth of the state, and this has been 

 accomplished only by the success of mosquito extermination 

 work. I have not added the saving due to the control of the 

 yellow fever cases, but it is definite. 



The splendid results in Essex County showing an increase in 

 the ratables of the meadows of that county of 3,117 per cent, 

 between 1905 and 1918, as well as an increase in the county as a 

 whole of 380 per cent, in valuations, as fully set forth in Bulletin 

 348, shows that the economic value of mosquito control work is 

 vast and far-reaching and of first importance. 



Gibbon tells us that the decline and fall of Rome was caused 

 by the degeneracy of the Romans, but in his relation to the causes 

 of the degeneracy he does not mention the chief cause. When 

 his great work was written science had not advanced to that point 

 where he should have known of the effect of the Anopheles — the 

 malaria-carrying mosquito — on the human race. The Romans, 

 after centuries of greatness, denuded the hills and mountains of 

 their timber, causing the floods in the Tiber to- overflow the 

 plains around Rome, and when subsiding, to leave vast pools and 

 marshes called the Campagna. The mosquitoes emerged from 

 these pools in myriads. As a result the population was constantly 

 afflicted with malaria, or Roman fever as they called it, so that 

 generation after generation suffered from the disease inoculated 

 by the mosquitoes. This so weakened them physically that their 

 fighting spirit had almost disappeared, and after having been 

 masters of the world, they fell an easy prey to Alaric and his bar- 

 barians, who owed their victory more to the harm done to the 

 Romans by the mosquitoes than to the prowess of their own 

 arms. You cannot, without some such cause, in four or five 

 generations change the fighting spirit that made a nation great, 

 into a spirit of almost abject surrender. 



The question is — what do her mosquitoes cost New Jersey? 

 It is not a question of the amounts the commissions and the 

 Experiment Station are spending to clean up and exterminate this 

 menace to human life. No, the question is asked in the same 

 sense as of a man who runs a large and costly yacht, or maintains 

 an extensive and expensive estate. What does it cost to run the 



