MOSQUITOES AND FLIES
Mosquitoes
The mosquitoes, perhaps more than any other noxious insect, impel us to ask the impertinent question, why pests were made to annoy us. It would be well enough to answer that they were given as a test of the efficiency of our science in learning how to control them, if it were not for the other creatures, the wild animals, whose existence must be at times a continual torment from the bites of insects and from the diseases transmitted by them. Such creatures must endure their tortures without hope of relief, and there is ample evidence of the suffering that insects cause them.
In earlier and more primitive days the rainwater barrel and the town watering trough took the place of the course in nature study in our present-day schools. While the lessons of the water barrel and the trough were perhaps not exact or thoroughly scientific, we at least got our learning from them at first hand. We all knew then what "wigglers" and "horsehair snakes" were; and we knew that the former turned into mosquitoes as surely as we believed that the latter came from horsehairs. Modern nature study has set us upon the road to more exact science, but the aquarium can never hold the mysteries of the old horse trough or the marvels of the rainwater barrel.
The supposed ancestry of the horsehair snake is now an exploded myth, but the advance of science has unfortunately not altered the fact that wigglers turn into mosquitoes, except in so far as the spread of applied sanitation has brought it about that fewer of them than formerly succeeded in doing so. And now, as we leave the homely objects of our first acquaintance with "wigglers" for the more convenient apparatus of the laboratory, we will call the creatures mosquito larvae, since that is what they are.
The rainwater barrel never told us how those wiggling
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