Rensselaer Semi-Weekly Republican, Volume 39, Number 100, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 23 August 1907 — THE WAR ON MOSQUITOES. [ARTICLE]

THE WAR ON MOSQUITOES.

By Fer»l«tent Effort New Jersey Has 'Triumphed Over the Post. By the intelligent expenditure of what seem like absurdly small sums of money when compared "with the supposed difficulty of the task to be performed, several of the parts of New Jersey that havs long had a national, if not an intern#’ tionai,. d;Br<»pute for the number and vor. racity of their mosquitoes have been practically cleared of the dangerouspestsi The suggestion that the great Hackensack “Meadows could be freed-of the insects, and the joys of summer life in the cities around them thus be vastly increased, -was received with derision, and almost with indignation, only a few years ago. Yet a few thousand dollars spent in digging ditches has done away with the stagnant pools in which alone the mosquitoes could breed, and they are no more except in the benighted towns where the people lack either the sense or the energy or both to avail themselves of the relief so close within their reach. Incidentally —and it is incidentally—lot of worthless marsh has been turned into good dry land. — — J,— What has been done on and around the Hackensack Meadows can be even more easily done almost anywhere else. It ought to be as disgraceful—indeed, it is as disgraceful—for a town to have mosquitoes as it is for a town to suffer from an epidemic of typhoid or diphtheria, for the mosquitoes, too, are “preventable,” and their presence i anywhere convicts their human victims' either of gross ignorance or of criminal carelessness. And always it should be remembered that the use of oil in a/mosquito campaign is justifiable, if at all, only as a temporary expedient, to be resorted to only for instant effects while the real work of extermination is in course of preparation and performance, V ■