Mosquitoes e-bog

Whilst the greatest effort has been made to ensure the quality of this text, due to the historical nature of this content, in some rare cases there may be minor issues with legibility. Some years ago I was visiting a family in the mountains. It was during a dry season, and water was scarce. There were no swamps, no lakes or pools, and the drinking-water was taken from springs; yet mosquitoes were so plentiful that it was necessary to screen the porches, that sitting out of an evening might be made possible. I asked where the water came from in which they washed their clothes, and they replied, as expected, From a rain-water tank, which, as it happened, was situated under the porch. I investigated the tank and found it literally alive with mosquito larvae. A pint of kerosene stopped the breeding, and as the water was drawn from a faucet near the bottom of the tank the kerosene did not injure it.<br><br>The indifference of this family as to the source of their local mosquito pest, or rather their combined ignorance of and indifference to the subject of the breeding-places, was at that time - and it was not so very long ago - characteristic of people in general. It was my good fortune, through the wide-spread newspaper accounts of my kerosene experiments in the Catskill Mountains in 1892, to become more or less identified with many practical experiments in the destruction of mosquitoes from that time on.