WHOLE VOL. APPLIED ENTOMOLOGY HOWARD 491 



Surinam for two years, eventually going to Amsterdam where Doctor 

 Bonne took the post of Director of the Laboratory of the Dutch 

 Cancer Research Institute. It is too bad that he has left medical ento- 

 mology, but I notice that recent papers by Dr. E. W. Walch on 

 mosquito matters relating to the Dutch East Indies have had the 

 advantage of cooperation with Doctor Bonne-Wepster. Doctor Walch 

 himself was in Washington in 1924. 



In medical entomology, of course, the Italians have taken a very 

 considerable part. Battista Grassi, a man of broad training, educated 

 in part in Germany, and married to a German wife, and who had 

 written extensively upon many entomological topics, claimed to have 

 antedated Ronald Ross in the discovery that human malaria is carried 

 by Anopheles. The bitter controversy that ensued was carried on 

 vehemently until Grassi's death in 1925. Even in 1927, when I called 

 on Ross in England, he could not speak of Grassi without profanity. 

 " Celli," he said, " was a gentleman, but Grassi was a damned pirate." 

 In his earlier writings Ross used to include Celli in his denunciations, 

 and in fact the whole Italian school. In 1910, however, in an expedition 

 with Celli on the Roman campagna. I asked him, rather ironically, 

 whether he had heard recently from his " friend Ross," and he replied 

 that they were now good friends and that he (Celli) had contributed 

 a chapter to Ross' big book, " The Prevention of Malaria," which was 

 published in that year. 



The economic development of Italy had been so hampered for so 

 many years by the prevalence of malaria in the southern half of the 

 peninsula that the disease had been more diligently studied there than 

 in any other part of the world. The Italian medical literature on the 

 subject was very great. A number of medical men, including Marchia- 

 fava, Celli, Bastianelli, and Bignami, who afterwards became noted 

 in the medico-entomological work, had been assiduously studying 

 malaria and publishing for many years before Anopheles was dis- 

 covered to be the vector, and especially in the interval between the 

 finding of the causative organism of the disease by Laveran in 1880 

 and the eventful year 1898 when the mosquito relation was discovered 

 by Ross. But Grassi, who was primarily a zoologist, did not really 

 enter the field until 1898 when his " Relations Between Malaria and 

 Certain Insects " was published, but from that time on his papers were 

 frequent, often in collaboration with Bignami and Bastianelli, 



I have taken the stand that the award of the Nobel Prize to Ross 

 must have been preceded by so careful an examination of the evidence 

 of priority in the great discovery that the scientific world might well 

 consider the question as settled ; but as late as 1923, when calling on 



