THE STORY OF AN ENTOMOLOGIST 



at no time did it exceed 39°. (Previous work had shown that 

 the insects became active only at 42° F.) I arrived in London late 

 at night. The weather was cold, and I placed the packet on the 

 window ledge outside my room. Early next morning I looked 

 up a fishmonger and got him to put the packet in his cold room, 

 since for two or three days I had to attend the important trien- 

 nial meeting of the Imperial Bureau of Entomology. 



Then one morning I took it out, boarded the boat train, 

 reached Paris at four o'clock in the afternoon, and was met at 

 the Gare du Nord by Dr. Marchal. We hastened across Paris 

 in a taxi to his laboratory in the Rue Claude Bernard, where a 

 pear tree, well covered with the Woolly Aphis, stood in a large 

 pot covered with gauze. The surface of the ground in the pot 

 in which the gauze-covered tree had been planted was covered 

 by white paper. 



Now was the interesting moment. The laboratory assistants 

 gathered around. The gauze was removed. The boxes were 

 opened one by one, and their contents were dumped on the 

 white paper. To our great chagrin we saw at once that many 

 (possibly all) of the little black parasites had already issued 

 and died. Their minute black corpses showed plainly on the 

 white paper. It was a great disappointment, but we placed the 

 gauze over the tree again and left it. 



The next day Marchal and I started on a long journey to visit 

 his laboratories in the south of France. We went by train to 

 Lyons, and thence by boat to Avignon. There we were met by a 

 government automobile driven by a soldier and were carried off 

 to Aries, where we were joined by P. Vayssiere, with whom we 

 went south to the Gulf of Fos, incidentally visiting several places 

 to see the work against the Moroccan locust. We stopped, by 

 the way, at J. H. Fabre's old place at Serignan, and at Orange, 

 where we called on Vayssiere's charming old grandmother, then 



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