THE STORY OF AN ENTOMOLOGIST 



sites were lacking, and I soon began a card catalogue of the 

 recorded host-relationships of these useful insects, which com- 

 prised the whole world. 



A few years later, rather significantly, my address as retiring 

 president of the Entomological Society of Washington, in 1884, 

 was entitled : "A Commencement of the Study of the Parasites of 

 Cosmopolitan Insects," and in it I discussed the general question 

 and printed tables indicating the extent of our knowledge of such 

 forms at that time, so far as I had been able to bring them to- 

 gether from the literature. 



From that time on I wrote more or less frequently on the 

 subject, and not only continued the great catalogue, but began 

 to see many opportunities for the promotion of natural control 

 work of this kind. 



Of course there had been earlier suggestions of this general 

 nature, and these have been referred to by Marchal and by Sil- 

 vestri in their very much later publications on this general subject. 

 And then, in 1888, came the extraordinary verification of the 

 value of natural control in the introduction and acclimatization 

 of the Australian Ladybird in Southern California. This extraor- 

 dinary and now famous success, which undoubtedly saved the 

 citrus growing industry of California from speedy destruction, 

 was a good thing and a bad thing. It was a blessing since it 

 started all over the world the long chain of experimental work 

 which after many failures and much expenditure of money is 

 gradually becoming understood and systematized. It was bad 

 only because it aroused many false hopes. In fact, it is safe to say 

 that progress in the battle against injurious insects on the western 

 coast of the United States was set back for ten years or more on 

 account of the supreme reliance on this method of fighting pests 

 and the consequent abandoning of every other means and every 

 other line o£ research. 



[91] 



