Personal Narrative Of Travels To The Equinoctial Regions Of America During The Years 1799-1804 - Volume 2 - By Alexander Von Humboldt And Aime Bonpland.
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At The Rio Magdalena The Frequency Of Mosquitos
Is Regarded As Troublesome, But Salutary.
These animals, say the
inhabitants, give us slight bleedings, and preserve us, in a country
excessively hot, from the scarlet fever, and other inflammatory
diseases.
But at the Orinoco, the banks of which are very
insalubrious, the sick blame the mosquitos for all their sufferings.
It is unnecessary to refute the fallacy of the popular belief that the
action of the mosquitos is salutary by its local bleedings. In Europe
the inhabitants of marshy countries are not ignorant that the insects
irritate the epidermis, and stimulate its functions by the venom which
they deposit in the wounds they make. Far from diminishing the
inflammatory state of the skin, the stings increase it.
The frequency of gnats and mosquitos characterises unhealthy climates
only so far as the development and multiplication of these insects
depend on the same causes that give rise to miasmata. These noxious
animals love a fertile soil covered with plants, stagnant waters, and
a humid air never agitated by the wind; they prefer to an open country
those shades, that softened day, that tempered degree of light, heat,
and moisture which, while it favours the action of chemical
affinities, accelerates the putrefaction of organised substances. May
not the mosquitos themselves increase the insalubrity of the
atmosphere? When we reflect that to the height of three or four toises
a cubic foot of air is often peopled by a million of winged insects,*
(* It is sufficient to mention, that the cubic foot contains 2,985,984
cubic lines.) which contain a caustic and venomous liquid; when we
recollect that several species of culex are 1.8 lines long from the
head to the extremity of the corslet (without reckoning the legs);
lastly, when we consider that in this swarm of mosquitos and gnats,
diffused in the atmosphere like smoke, there is a great number of dead
insects raised by the force of the ascending air, or by that of the
lateral currents which are caused by the unequal heating of the soil,
we are led to inquire whether the presence of so many animal
substances in the air must not occasion particular miasmata.
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