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These facts account for its exceptionally rapid work, for in point of fact, 
within a year and a half of its first introduction, it had practically 
cleared oft the Fluted Scale throughout the infested region. The expres- 
sions of two well-known people may be quoted here to illustrate the gen- 
eral verdict. Prof. W. A. Henry, Director of the Wisconsin Agricul- 
ture Experiment Station, who visited California in 1889, reported that 
the work of Vedalia was ‘“ the finest illustration possible of the value 
of the Department to give the people aid in time of distress. And the 
distress was very great indeed.” Mr. William F. Channing, of Pasa- 
dena, son of the eminent Unitarian divine, wrote two years later: 
We owe to the Agricultural Department the rescue of our orange culture by the 
importation of the Australian ladybird, Vedalia cardinalis. 
The white scales were incrusting our orange trees with a hideous leprosy. They 
spread with wonderful rapidity and would have made citrus growth on the whole 
North American continent impossible within a few years. It took the Vedalia, 
where introduced, only a few weeks absolutely to clean out the white scale. The 
deliverance was more like a miracle than anything I have ever seen. In the spring 
of 1889 I had abandoned my young Washington navel orange trees as irrecoverable. 
Those same trees bore from two to three boxes of oranges apiece at the end of the 
season (or winter ard spring of 1890). The consequence of the deliverance is that 
many hundreds of thousands of orange trees (navels almost exclusively) have been 
set out in southern California this last spring. 
In other words, the victory over the scale was complete and will prac- 
tically remain so. The history of the introduction of this pest, its 
spread for upwards of twenty years, and the discouragement which 
resulted, the numerous experiments which were made to overcome the 
insect, and its final reduction to unimportant numbers by means of an 
apparently insignificant little beetle imported for the purpose from 
Australia will always remain one of the most interesting stories in the 
records of practical entomology. 
The Vedalia has since been successfully colonized at the Cape of 
Good Hope and in Egypt, and has produced the same results in each 
case. In Egypt the Vedalia was introduced to prey upon an allied 
species of Icerya (I. egyptiacum, Douglas). We hope soon to be able to 
send the same insect to India, where it has recently transpired that 
Tcerya egyptiacum occurs, while recent information received from Phra 
Suriya, royal commissioner of Siam at Chicago, would indicate that its 
introduction into Siam for the same or a closely allied insect will be 
desirable in the near future. 
In fact, the success of the experiment was so striking and so impor- 
tant, and resulted in the saving to California of an industry of so great 
a money value, that it has given rise, not only in the popular mind but 
in the minds of a certain class of entomologists also, to the idea that 
remedial work against injurious insects should be concentrated upon 
this one line of action, and that our best hope for their destruction 
lies with the parasitic and predaceous species, not to mention fungus and 
_ bacterial diseases. From an extreme of comparative incredulity the 
