fertilizing cloud, in which only one out of many millions of floating
particles can ever hit the mark. The mosquito is able to procreate
without ever satisfying its ravenous appetite for blood. To swell its
grey thread-like abdomen to a coral bead is a delight to the insect, but
not necessary to its existence, like food and water to ours; it is the
great prize in the lottery of life, which few can ever succeed in
drawing. In a hot summer, when one has ridden perhaps for half a day
over a low-lying or wet district, through an atmosphere literally
obscured with a fog of mosquitoes, this fact strikes the mind very
forcibly, for in such places it frequently is the case that mammals do
not exist, or are exceedingly rare. In Europe it is different. There, as
Reaumur said, possibly one gnat in every hundred may be able to gratify
its appetite for blood; but of the gnats in many districts in South
America it would be nearer the mark to say that only one in a hundred
millions can ever do so.

Curtis discovered that only the female mosquito bites or sucks blood,
the male being without tongue or mandibles; and he asks, What, then,
does the male feed on? He conjectures that it feeds on flowers; but, had
he visited some swampy places in hot countries, where flowers are few
and the insects more numerous than the sands on the seashore, he would
most probably have said that the males subsist on decaying vegetable
matter and moisture of slime. It is, however, more important to know
what the female subsists on. We know that she thirsts for warm mammalian
blood, that she seeks it with avidity, and is provided with an admirable
organ for its extraction--only, unfortunately for her, she does not get
it, or, at all events, the few happy individuals that do get it are
swamped in the infinite multitude of those that are doomed by nature to
total abstinence.