FIGHTING THE INSECTS 



had had almost no education and he was not a broad ento- 

 mologist. 



While W. F. Fiske's work in a quite different region did not 

 bring about the spectacular results that came from Koebele's 

 sending of the Australian Ladybird to California, he was a well- 

 trained and extremely thoughtful and ingenious man. His work 

 at the receiving end of the sendings of the parasites of the Gipsy 

 Moth and the Brown-tail Moth from abroad, as displayed in the 

 large volume published as Bulletin 91 of the Bureau of En- 

 tomology, has given him a distinctive rank and a very high one 

 among the early workers. And then his subsequent work as an 

 explorer added greatly to his standing. 



In a book that I wrote rather recently and that was published 

 in 1931 by the Century Company under the title, "The Insect 

 Menace," I told at some length two of the most striking stories 

 connected with parasite introduction. One was of the late 

 Frederick Muir and his extraordinary and successful efforts in 

 the face of great obstacles to find and to import into Hawaii 

 the parasites of the Sugar Cane Beetle Borer. The other was of 

 Fiske's remarkable achievement in the finding of a certain Gipsy 

 Moth parasite in the forests of Gioatauro, in Sicily, and of his 

 persistence and great ingenuity in securing quantities of this 

 parasite and getting it sent successfully to America. I wish that 

 I could retell these stories here. But I must not do so. They can 

 be looked up easily. 



In 1896 I published a bulletin entitled, "A Study in Insect 

 Parasitism." I am glad that I did so, not so much because it 

 was a good bulletin, but because it attracted Fiske's attention 

 and turned him toward this line of work. Unfortunately, he left 

 the service about 1912. He was then commissioned by the English 

 to take up a study of the Sleeping Sickness, and for a time con- 



["4] 



