WHOLE VOL. APPLIED ENTOMOLOGY — HOWARD 495 



After the war, however, when I visited Italy in 1920, CelU had 

 died, and, meeting Silvestri by appointment in Rome, he insisted that 

 we should look up Grassi, for whom he had great admiration. In fact, 

 he brought Grassi to my hotel at eight o'clock in the morning. To my 

 surprise, I found that Grassi had entirely dropped his Germanisms 

 and had become apparently a most polite, most suave and almost 

 typical Frenchman ; his French was lluent, his gestures were French, 

 and it was hard for me tO' realize that I was talking to an Italian and 

 particularly to the Germanized Italian I had known ten years previ- 

 ously. Evidently this was one of the minor results of the war. I 

 enjoyed my visit with Grassi greatly. And again, in 1923, we had an 

 extremely cordial and very instructive visit. He urged me in 1923 to 

 translate into English one of his manuscripts relating to his important 

 work at Fiumacino and to secure its publication in the United States 

 or in England. But he never sent me the manuscript, and he died in 

 the spring of 1925 before I reached Italy that year. 



Grassi was greatly opposed to the project of erecting bat-roosts on 

 the Campagna which had been urged by an Italian General of Engi- 

 neers who had been in the United States as a liaison officer during the 

 war and, stationed for a while" at one of the great concentration camps 

 in Texas, had fallen in with Dr. A. R. Campbell and had become 

 impressed by liis bat-roost scheme. This officer tried to push the plan 

 in Italy; and Grassi told me that Mussolini had consulted him con- 

 cerning the merits of the idea. Grassi said that he told " II Duce " 

 that bats were more abundant in the most malarious regions of Italy 

 than elsewhere. 



A story that I am fond of telling relates to the visit I made with 

 Grassi to Fiumacino in 1923. We were returning to Rome just before 

 dusk in an automobile. We passed a farm where a peasant and his 

 wife were working in the field within hailing distance from the road. 

 Grassi stopped the car and called out, " Hola, Guiseppe." The man 

 dropped his hoe, and instead of coming down to the road turned 

 abruptly and went intO' the house some distance to the right ; but the 

 woman came down to the road and shook hands with Grassi, who 

 turned to me and remarked, " Guiseppe is a great anarchist." Where- 

 upon, I supposed that he had gone into the house to avoid meeting the 

 Senator. Presently, however, the man came out and approached the 

 car, with a bottle of white wine under one arm and three eggs in the 

 other hand. He gave the eggs to the Senator, who took them after a 

 murmured protest, and he offered me a drink of the wine. The 

 Senator, all amiability, remarked, " You know Guiseppe is a great 

 anarchist ; and the gentleman here, Guiseppe, is an American." To 



