The Mosquito.
There are more than three hundred and fifty tribes belonging to the mosquito race. These have been classified by the detectives of science into twenty-two families, and all placed in the same category with gnats, which are looked upon by most people as suspicious characters. These families are known by names of such “learned length and thundering sound” that it is thought safest to abstain from giving a list of them here; but like man, they may be known better by their color, habits and eccentricities than by name.
The mosquito is cosmopolitan, for he has explored and settled many parts of the arctic regions, including Alaska, Greenland and Iceland, and established his home on the continents of Europe, Asia and Africa, and in the remotest islands of the sea. He had very probably discovered America before Christopher Columbus set sail for the new world, and it is now pretty certain that he first colonized New Jersey.
He has figured extensively in the history of the world, yet he wears no laurel wreath of glory for valor in war. All martial victories and renown of his race belong to the gentler (?) sex of the family. She is a kind of Joan of Arc, of a fierce, restless and war-like spirit; but it is consoling to know that she is less savage in the temperate than in the torrid zone; for, we are informed by travelers that in the tropics she often leads her legions in a charge with fixed bayonets directly upon a sleeping man’s face, when they fall upon him in myriads, like pelting hailstones out of a storm-cloud.
There are instances of record in which her furious armies have filled the air for many miles, darkening the heavens like dense columns of flying cloud, and attacking man and beast like blood-thirsty demons. A Greek historian relates that such an army once swooped down upon ancient Greece and drove the inhabitants from their homes.
Besides being thus famous as a soldier, she enjoys the unique distinction of being a queen of song. Strange to say, in this gift she has a complete monopoly, while the male has been left to regret the sad fate of being forever songless and silent. However, he has been well compensated for this privation. Some tribes of his race have less musical talent than others; but those who have studied his anatomy, habits and genius declare that in tribes in which there are queens of song, he is, without doubt, the king of listeners, since nature has provided him with many hundreds of ears, no doubt to enhance his pleasure from vocal music. These curious ears are small hairs located on his antennæ, or feelers, which, like the strings of harp or violin under the touch of a virtuoso, tremble in unison with the harmony that flows from the living melodion of his queen, until his soul is on fire with melody. Not one of these delicately attuned ears ever seems to be shocked by a falsetto note from the vocal chords of his charmer. To him her song, like that of Wynomoinen, the magical singer, or the sirens of mythical story, is full of the power of enchantment; and the eavesdroppers of science who watch him and listen, tell us that he draws near her whenever she pours out her soul in song. The manner in which she produces her buzzing tones is very wonderful: The lower or contralto note is the result of the rapid vibration of her wings at the rate of three thousand per minute. It is not remarkable, then, that her flight is so swift from her enraged human pursuer. But when she trills and yodles and sings her high soprano, her fantastic music flows from stridulating organs which resemble tiny drums at the openings of minute air tubes. These higher runs thrill Monsignor Mosquito into ecstacies of pure delight. His ravished soul is borne out upon the silver sea of song as he sits on a honeysuckle sipping nectar, listening the while to the wooing voices of his divine inamoratas—the Pattis, Nilssons and Nordicas of his race. But not so with the human auditor of the mosquito prima donna who lies peacefully on his bed at night under the hypnotic spell of sweet sleep. Perchance it is midnight’s holy hour when he is suddenly awakened by a still small voice more pricking than the voice of conscience. He springs up and lights the gas or lamp and tries to draw nigh unto lady mosquito as did her enchanted knight with wings; he is thirsting for her life while she is thirsting for his blood.
But not only is our heroine celebrated in history as a warrior and a vocalist, but as a most dangerous enemy of mankind. Nature has seen fit to give her a long nose, or proboscis, which, according to the Darwinian theory, might prove her to be related to the elephant. She does not hesitate “to stick her nose into other people’s business,” and this is precisely the thing which, in the case of mosquitoes as of men, leads her into irreparable injury to humanity and very frequently to her own instant demise.
Those versed in the origin and evolution of the Culex (a nickname for the mosquito) teach us that his ancient grandmothers did not have the blood-sucking habit, but acquired it in later ages. Whether in acquiring this habit she was beset, like Mother Eve in Eden, by the power of a mighty temptation through the wily arts of his Satanic majesty, we are unable to say with certainty; but we are informed by her anatomists that alongside her formidable proboscis with its suction pump fixtures, are from two to six keen lances or spears, admirably adapted for making the necessary incisions in the skin of man and beast. Armed with such weapons for drawing blood, it is easy to guess how, during some of her nightly wanderings as a minstrel, temptation might have won an easy victory over her by giving her a taste of blood. It is probable that while on one of these lonely serenades she became enamored of some sleeping Apollo, and, stooping down to snatch a sweet warm kiss from his lordly brow, accidentally stuck her bill through the rosy cuticle and drew blood—taking another sip she said it was good, and thus she contracted the blood-sucking habit.
It is interesting to note that as with many other nations of the air so with this one, there is a sort of national anthem to which the Culex patriots seem more devotedly attached than human patriots are to theirs. Its divine strain, to the chivalrous male, is the very keynote of love, and he is charmed by its resistless power and drawn toward it as a beetle to a beacon light, or a boat to a whirlpool; for when its clarion note is sounded, like the weird, wild melody of Orpheus of old that thrilled dumb brutes and drew them in myriads around him, he is caught up and borne onward by its powerful pull to the spot whence the music comes.
While experimenting with harmonic telegraphy, a scientist of the South who resides at Jackson, Miss., happened to strike this key, and he reports that the mosquito came toward the “sounder” in great swarms. He soon afterwards devised a machine for electrocuting every mosquito that should respond to the magical note. Upon the very first trial they came teeming to the “sounder,” and when he turned on the electric current by pressing a button, they fell dead by the scores at his feet.
What a boon to humanity this novel application of electricity is destined to be. With such an instrument having a “sounder” attached, the disturbed sleeper of the future, who is not overly fond of mosquito song, can touch a button, by his bedside, to set the “sounder” to going, and then press another button to turn on the deadly current, and thus instantly electrocute every mosquito that disturbs his slumbers without ever moving from his pillow. Now, it has been urged by some that only the male mosquitoes will answer to the note made by the “sounder,” and thus only they would suffer death by the device. But this is by no means established, and even if shown to be true, it is evident that upon the males being thus dispatched the females would soon all withdraw or pine away with grief.
How vastly different and superior is the male Culex to the female from an ethical standpoint. He is opposed to war and is a harmless vegetarian and honey-sucker, while the female is a dangerous savage. He does not find his happiness in sucking the blood of his human or other neighbor, but in the contemplation of the beautiful. He may well be called the poet of his race; for he ever lives among the nectar drips and the paradises of color and perfume of the waiting flowers. He soars aloft into the sweeter, purer air to bathe his pinions in seas of radiant sunshine. He roams among the beauties of nature, seeking its sweets from every bud and leaf. All thoughts that flit across his microscopic brain are free from blood and war. He loves the beautiful wherever he finds it in the visible and tangible world and even in the fascinating buzz of his mosquito prima donna. But as ideally good as he seems to be, he, like man, has his faults and frailties. He is fond of travel and has been caught with many of his female companions stealing long rides on Pullman palace cars and ocean steamers. He is also very fond of beer, wine and whisky, and has been found “dead drunk” on sundry occasions. In this taste for intoxicants the female Culex does not indulge.
The mosquito has been recently charged with murder, arrested and brought to trial before a competent tribunal composed of medical men and others, and convicted. They have proved that his spouse is the principal and he the accomplice. The evidence shows that they belong to a family of mosquitoes, known by the infamous name of Anopheles, and they have used malaria, yellow fever and several other diseases with which to slay man; that the female is the entertainer of a very small creature, a kind of Jonah, whom she swallows, and after a time he gets down from her stomach into her proboscis, and when she bites her human victim he leaps into the wound where he remains and eats red-blood corpuscles, and when grown he breaks up into from six to ten pieces, each piece making a new animal life like the original; that they go on multiplying in this way into millions in the blood upon which they feast, and thus produce these dreadful maladies and consequent death.
Watauga.
