Page:Insects - Their Ways and Means of Living.djvu/387

 2UITOES AND FLIES

,|OSQUITOES 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 g:lven 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 animais, 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 sufl'ering 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 hot 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. \lodern 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 raJnwater barrel. The supposed ancestry of the horsehair shake is now an exploded myth, but the advance of science has unfortu- nately hot altered the fact that wigglers turn into mos- quitoes, except in so far as the spread of applied sanita- tion has brought it about that fewer of them than for- merly succeed 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 mosqu#o larvae, since that is what they are. OEhe rainwater barrel never told us how those wiggling

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INSECTS