N. J. Mosquito Extermination Association 105 



mentioned but lack of time forbids, and this paper is quite long 

 enough. I hope some day my paper may be even shorter and may 

 contain simply the following: ''No mosquitoes at all in Bergen 

 County last summer." Then I know you will all sit back and 

 furnish the title by saying as one man, "New and Unusual." 



PrKSident Meyers — Are there any questions or discussion of 

 this paper ? 



Secretary Headlee — Mr. Chairman, the type of tide-dike 

 which Mr. Brown describes is new in mosquito work. Always 

 heretofore we have attempted to make a bond between the dike 

 and the marsh surface, holding that that was necessary to prevent 

 leakage. The bond was usually affected by digging a ditch 

 through the sod. packing in the clay and giving the dike an im- 

 pervious core. In this case the dike was constructed on the 

 meadov^ surface without any cutting of the sod beneath, and 

 simply consisted of soil piled up in the form of that dike, with 

 borders of sod. 



When I saw the completed dike I thought it would surely leak, 

 and I believe there was a place or two where it did leak, but that 

 was rather promptly fixed up and it has done wonderfully well. 

 The price of the dike, considering the cost of labor when it was 

 built, is extraordinarily low, being 35 cents a foot, the size which 

 Mr. Brown described. I personally inspected the tidegate which 

 Mr. Brown described in Eckle's Creek, and that is a case of a 

 tidegate set across the old channel of the creek which is always 

 a difficult place to put a tidegate structure, because, usually, 

 where the creek goes into the river or into the thoroughfare, the 

 bottom is covered with soft mud and that mud is deep. It is 

 filled with water and it is very difficult to make a bulkhead tight 

 enough to keep little streams of water from getting through, and 

 the small streams under those conditions soon become large 

 streams and pretty soon the tidegate is undermined. 



Yet that structure has been there for a considerable period of 

 time. It has been subjected to all the ordinary tests of wind and 

 tide and rain, and it stands as firm, apparently, as the day it was 

 built. 



There is a new feature which Mr. Brown brought out in the 

 building of the front wall of the bulkhead. A large timber is 

 laid at the back of the front series of sheet piling and bolted to 

 it. That timber is large and stiff, and as a result, when I saw it 

 some months after it had been built, the front wall of that bulk- 

 head was just as straight as when it was put in — no weakening — 

 no changing of direction. To anyone who is familiar with ordi- 



