Evening Republican, Volume 15, Number 10, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 12 January 1911 — WAYS OF KILLING MOSQUITO [ARTICLE]

WAYS OF KILLING MOSQUITO

Honolulu Man Tells of Experiments in Hawaiian laland—One Method by Use of Gas. New York.—Two new methods of exterminating mosquitoes, which have been ' adopted with great success In Honolulu, have been recommended to the New York health department by Ernest Mott Bmlth, secretary of the territorial government, who Is making his first visit to New York in five years. One of the new methods of combating the mosquito Is by the use of gas, while the other Is the employment of mosquito fish. The gaa method, according to Mr. Smith, was discovered by accident. “We started using oil,’* he gays, “but there was complaint that this gummed up the sewage drains, and then our chief sanitary officer hit upon the use of calcium carbide. One day in cleaning out Tils automobile lamps he threw some of the calcium carbide into an old bucket in which were a lot of embryonic mosquitos. The next morning he discovered that the wigglers were all dead. He made some experiments and found that calcium carbide was almost as inexpensive as oil and more effective, so since then we have been killing mosquitos by gas.

“Then we employ mosquito fish. They are little creatures from an inch and a half to two inches long. , Yon can take a Jar so black with wigglers that you cannot see through the water and pnt one of these fish into It, and In half an hour there will not be a single wlggler outside the fish. The fish are as transparent as glass when empty, but after such s meal their bodies are black with the wigglers they have swallowed."