ONE OF THE HARMLESS ANOPHELES MOSQUITOS
(Anopheles punctipennis, Say)
The malarial mosquito, so called, has spotted wings, but otherwise it looks quite like this harmless form from Maryland. This whole tribe of Anopheles differs from the Culex in the length of its mouth feelers, which project from the base of the proboscis and appear in the photograph almost as long as the proboscis itself, whereas in a photograph of the Culex it would appear so short as to seem merely a thickening of the base of the proboscis.
The wildest fancy of the Arabian story-teller is lacking in imagination compared with the story which the facts of modern science have woven about these tiny representatives of the fly family.
Who could imagine that just because the lady mosquitos, tiring of their usual meal of ripe bananas and plant juices, acquired the habit of sucking blood, vast regions would be devastated and beings millions of times their size would die by thousands. And this, too, not through any real fault of the tiny creatures themselves, but just because some of the persons whose blood they sucked had microscopic wiggling things living in their blood corpuscles, which crawled into the soft throat glands of the mosquito and waited there for a chance to get out into the blood channels of some other human beings.
When one pictures the grief of desolated homes, death-bed agonies of tossing fever patients, the quarantined vessels at anchor in tropical harbors, yellow flagged, with crews dead or dying, the streets of deserted houses from which all life has gone forever through yellow fever and malaria, there is something ghastly in the picture of the winged lady mosquitos flitting airily from pale-faced patients to ruddy-cheeked happy people, unwitting carriers of death.
No conquest of science seems more wonderful in its simplicity and more remarkable in its importance than the discovery that the glands at the base of the mosquito’s bill can become diseased and harbor a microscopic parasite, and transform this merely buzzing, annoying insect into one of the most dangerous creatures alive. To Dr. L. O. Howard, the pioneer of economic entomology, is due the great credit for first showing how this creature can be killed by the use of kerosene on the stagnant waters where the females lay their eggs.
