“The draining of the swamp lands is not a new idea. Such lands are not only unproductive of anything which can subserve any important purpose, but they are productive of numerous evils. Teeming with miasma, the home of mischievous and annoying insects they are blotches upon the otherwise fair face of nature. To tender them fruitful and productive of good rather than evil, is a problem for which a solution has been anxiously sought, but heretofore only partially obtained.” ~ Scientific American, 1868
This was thirty years before a definitive connection was made between mosquitoes and malaria. The word malaria means “bad air,” since it was early thought that the miasmas of swamps caused the disease.
Backyard and Beyond 
0 Responses to “Old School”