THE STORY OF AN ENTOMOLOGIST 



oilered no definite help. I inquired about a correspondent, 

 Josef Jablonowski, and was answered that he was not a scientific 

 man, but a kind of farmer who taught in the Viticultural Institute 

 over in old Pesth. At that time (this was in 1905) such an attitude 

 on the part of the Museum workers did not shock me, as applied 

 entomology was hardly recognized as very scientific by the 

 museum and university people. Fortunately we have gone away 

 beyond this, and Jablonowski, at the time of his retirement in 

 1928, was a recognized scientific force in Hungary, as well as 

 all around the world. 



In spite of this discouraging comment, I crossed the Danube 

 and rejoiced in my soul at the first sight of Jablonowski's beam- 

 ing and welcoming face. He was then a man of perhaps forty- 

 five years of age. He was able to give me an important point at 

 once. He showed me a dry-goods box with a wire gauze cover, 

 and in the box were some of the previous winter's nests of the 

 Brown-tail Moth. He told me that in the spring he had seen 

 minute winged parasites on the underside of the gauze cover, 

 and this of course meant to him and to me that there are parasites 

 in these over-wintering silken nests, and that we had only to 

 collect these nests in large numbers and ship them to the United 

 States. 



But there was always the possibility that these minute creatures 

 were not parasites of the Brown-tail Moth, but that they had 

 simply crawled into the nests for protection during the winter. 

 Jablonowski and I could not understand each other perfectly 

 at that time, since his French was not of the best and mine was 

 even poorer, but I gathered that he was emphatically of the 

 opinion that the little creatures he had seen were true parasites of 

 the Brown-tail. 



At all events, I was prepared to take the risk, and as a result 

 during the following winter many thousands of these silken nests 



[95] 



