314 INSECTS AND MAN 



if any were found. The work was entrusted to Mr Russell 

 S. Woglum, and, having previously decided that his ulti- 

 mate goal was most likely to be attained in the tropical 

 or semi-tropical portions of the Orient, he set sail from 

 New York in July 1910. Visits to Spain, Italy, and Sicily 

 showed that, though the great European citrus belt was 

 beset by many injurious insects, the white fly was not one 

 of them. Investigations in Ceylon, Java, and the Philip- 

 pines also provided negative results there were citrus- 

 trees in plenty and countless insect pests, but no white fly. 

 At the Indian Museum, in Calcutta, the investigator knew 

 he was " getting warm," for there he found specimens of 

 Aleyrodes citri that had been collected from orange leaves 

 in the North -Western Himalayas seventeen years pre- 

 viously. In the autumn of 1910 Mr Woglum found him- 

 self at Saharanpur, and there had the satisfaction of 

 encountering the living white fly for the first time since 

 he left America ; the infestation, however, was light, and 

 the sooty mould, which always accompanies the fly in 

 Florida, was absent. 



The discovery of the white fly was quickly followed by 

 the recognition of its natural enemy, a small reddish-brown 

 ladybird, about a tenth of an inch in length. Was Crypto- 

 gnatha flavescens, for that was the insect's name, to prove 

 a second Novius cardinalis, the inveterate foe of the 

 cottony cushion scale ? One may imagine with what 

 feverish anxiety two hundred specimens of this minute 

 beetle were collected, by placing large sheets beneath the 

 trees in the early morning before the insects had become 

 active, and then beating the branches with sticks. With 

 what expressions of good fortune the little emigrants were 

 packed in double-chambered boxes, one half filled with 

 damp sphagnum moss, the other with dry fibre from a 

 palm-tree, forwarded post-haste to Calcutta and shipped to 

 the United States. One may conjure up visions, too, of 

 the chagrin of the collector on learning that not one of his 



