FIGHTING THE INSECTS 



written to several experts in Little Russia and Bessarabia, telling 

 them of my coming and my purpose. So in the early spring of 

 that year I took the Oriental Express from Paris down to Buda- 

 pest, picked up my former courier, Alexander Pichler, a capital 

 fellow who for years was one of the leading couriers of South- 

 eastern Europe, and started to the northeast for Kiew. We broke 

 the journey at Lemberg, in Galician Poland, a place later to 

 become famous in the great World War. The country from 

 Budapest to Lemberg seemed one gigantic wheat-field. Previous 

 to leaving Budapest, I had met in the lobby of the Hotel Hun- 

 garia a number of men connected with great grain firms in 

 Liverpool, who had come down in the spring to look into the 

 prospects of the wheat crop for that year, and who told me that 

 it was an annual journey for them. Eventually reaching Kiew, 

 I met by appointment Professor Waldemar Pospelow of the 

 University there, a slender, handsome, blond-bearded young Rus- 

 sian of high scientific attainment, and with him talked over the 

 question of the Russian parasites of the Gipsy Moth. He recom- 

 mended to me the desirability of renting a garden in the suburbs 

 of Kiew, and conducting there through the summer a large 

 number of rearing experiments with the parasites of both the 

 Gipsy Moth and the Brown-tail Moth, and to make at the same 

 time some biological studies concerning them. I fell in with this 

 plan very readily. This was the first bit of work of this precise 

 kind that was done for us in a foreign country. One of Pos- 

 pelow's graduate students was engaged for the season (I have 

 forgotten his name). The garden had already been selected, and 

 I advanced money to Pospelow to complete the contract and to 

 pay the rent for the first two months. It was a large garden filled 

 with fruit trees — in fact, it was an orchard rather than a garden — 

 and probably covered two or more acres. The rental price was 

 fifteen dollars a month. 



[102] 



