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.
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CONDUCTED BY GENELLA FITZGERALD NYE.