a handbook of the mosquitoes of north america - Systematic Catalog ...

PREFACE
Mosquitoes are familiar to everyone. They have plagued
mankind from the earliest times and they still contest his
advance into almost every region of the globe. During the
short summer, the Arctic region swarms with them and veri-
table fairy tales have come to us fro,m explorers, travelers, and
scientists who have visited these lands. The temperate regions
are not exempt from countless hordes while the tropics have
them at nearly all seasons of the year. Though man has suf-
fered so much from them, it is one of the riddles of advancing
knowledge that he has learned so little about them. Not till
the nineties did we know aught of their life-histories except
Reaumur’s ( 1738) delightful account of the house mosquito
(C&x pipiem) which was copied and dilated upon as the gen-
eral life-cycle of all mosquitoes. Dr. L. 0. Howard was the
first person in America to study the life-cycle of an anopheline
mosquito and he published an account of his observations in
1900.’ Shortly before this Sir Ronald Ross (1897-1899)
demonstrated that the “dappled-winged” mosquitoes (Ano-
p/&es spp. ) are vectors of human malaria and the ordinary
mosquito (Cz~lex spp. ) is the vector of ibird malaria. These re-
markable discoveries resulted in immediate intensive studies in
mosquito biology and taxonomy. In the autumn of 1900, the
American Yellow Fever Commission, consisting of Major Wal-
ter C. Reed, Dr. James Carroll, Jesse W. Lazear, and Dr. H.
Agramonte, announced that Culex fasciatzu (now Aedes
aegypti, or Aedes calopus or Aedes argezteus or Stegonzyia
fasciata) is the vector of Yellow Fever. This discovery was
soon fully confirmed and gave great impetus to the study of
Culicid biology. Since 1900, an immense, one might almost
’ When Howard’s observations were published, Professor Minot,
of Harvard, recalled some of his earlier work and published, in 1901,
an account of rearing an Anopheles species.