The Mosquito.
There are more than three hundred and fifty tribes belonging to the
mosquito race. These have been classified by the detectives of science
into twenty-two families, and all placed in the same category with
gnats, which are looked upon by most people as suspicious characters.
These families are known by names of such “learned length and thundering
sound” that it is thought safest to abstain from giving a list of them
here; but like man, they may be known better by their color, habits and
eccentricities than by name.
The mosquito is cosmopolitan, for he has explored and settled many parts
of the arctic regions, including Alaska, Greenland and Iceland, and
established his home on the continents of Europe, Asia and Africa, and in
the remotest islands of the sea. He had very probably discovered America
before Christopher Columbus set sail for the new world, and it is now
pretty certain that he first colonized New Jersey.
He has figured extensively in the history of the world, yet he wears no
laurel wreath of glory for valor in war. All martial victories and renown
of his race belong to the gentler (?) sex of the family. She is a kind
of Joan of Arc, of a fierce, restless and war-like spirit; but it is
consoling to know that she is less savage in the temperate than in the
torrid zone; for, we are informed by travelers that in the tropics she
often leads her legions in a charge with fixed bayonets directly upon a
sleeping man’s face, when they fall upon him in myriads, like pelting
hailstones out of a storm-cloud.
There are instances of record in which her furious armies have filled the
air for many miles, darkening the heavens like dense columns of flying
cloud, and attacking man and beast like blood-thirsty demons. A Greek
historian relates that such an army once swooped down upon ancient Greece
and drove the inhabitants from their homes.
Besides being thus famous as a soldier, she enjoys the unique distinction
of being a queen of song. Strange to say, in this gift she has a complete
monopoly, while the male has been left to regret the sad fate of being
forever songless and silent. However, he has been well compensated for
this privation. Some tribes of his race have less musical talent than
others; but those who have studied his anatomy, habits and genius declare
that in tribes in which there are queens of song, he is, without doubt,
the king of listeners, since nature has provided him with many hundreds
of ears, no doubt to enhance his pleasure from vocal music. These curious
ears are small hairs located on his antennæ, or feelers, which, like
the strings of harp or violin under the touch of a virtuoso, tremble
in unison with the harmony that flows from the living melodion of his
queen, until his soul is on fire with melody. Not one of these delicately
attuned ears ever seems to be shocked by a falsetto note from the vocal
chords of his charmer. To him her song, like that of Wynomoinen, the
magical singer, or the sirens of mythical story, is full of the power of
enchantment; and the eavesdroppers of science who watch him and listen,
tell us that he draws near her whenever she pours out her soul in song.
The manner in which she produces her buzzing tones is very wonderful: The
lower or contralto note is the result of the rapid vibration of her wings
at the rate of three thousand per minute. It is not remarkable, then,
that her flight is so swift from her enraged human pursuer. But when
she trills and yodles and sings her high soprano, her fantastic music
flows from stridulating organs which resemble tiny drums at the openings
of minute air tubes. These higher runs thrill Monsignor Mosquito into
ecstacies of pure delight. His ravished soul is borne out upon the silver
sea of song as he sits on a honeysuckle sipping nectar, listening the
while to the wooing voices of his divine inamoratas—the Pattis, Nilssons
and Nordicas of his race. But not so with the human auditor of the
mosquito prima donna who lies peacefully on his bed at night under the
hypnotic spell of sweet sleep. Perchance it is midnight’s holy hour when
he is suddenly awakened by a still small voice more pricking than the
voice of conscience. He springs up and lights the gas or lamp and tries
to draw nigh unto lady mosquito as did her enchanted knight with wings;
he is thirsting for her life while she is thirsting for his blood.
But not only is our heroine celebrated in history as a warrior and a
vocalist, but as a most dangerous enemy of mankind. Nature has seen fit
to give her a long nose, or proboscis, which, according to the Darwinian
theory, might prove her to be related to the elephant. She does not
hesitate “to stick her nose into other people’s business,” and this is
precisely the thing which, in the case of mosquitoes as of men, leads
her into irreparable injury to humanity and very frequently to her own
instant demise.
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.