Evening Republican, Volume 16, Number 168, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 15 July 1912 — Texas Will Fight Mosquito With Bat. [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

Texas Will Fight Mosquito With Bat.

QAN ANTONIO, Tex.—There is a iJ man in Texas who has found out a new way to fight the mosquito. His name is Dr. Charles R. Campbell. He is official bacteriologist of the city of San Antonio. Hi* Idea Is to employ hats a* mosquito fighters. The neighborhood of San Antonio is especially plagued by mosquitoes—malaria is more or less rife in that vicinity—and for a long tame past the inhabitants of the municipality and its suburbs have eagerly sought to find a solution of the problem. Much benefit has been obtains* by keeping minnows In cisterns and nonda these email fishes being

Bats, as is well known, are insect eaters, and are particularly fond of mosquitoes. In the twilight, when they rove abroad, they devour immense numbers of the pestiferous insects, the manner being to dash bade and forth through a swarm apd gobble the victims up by the wholesale. In view of which fact it occurred to Dr. Campbell that it might be a good Idea to establish in and about San Antonio a number of ”bat roosts,” as he calls them—that is to say, structures so contrived as to Invite bats for sleeping purposes. He has already set up two of them, and proposes to erect others, those already in opera-, tlon having proved highly successful. There are no windows, but opportunity of entrance is afforded to the bats by a series of horizontal openings so arranged an to resemble the slats of an ordinary window shutter. -The whole building Is thirty feet high, the upper twenty feet being the Inclosed portion, and the slatted arrangement runs up each erf the two