PARASITIC AND PREDACEOUS INSECTS. 681 



was very great indeed." Mr. William F. Charming, of Pasadena, 

 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, when intro- 

 duced, only a few years 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 irrevocable. Those same trees 

 bore from two to three boxes of oranges apiece at the end of the 

 season (or winter and 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 Cali- 

 fornia this last spring." 



In other words, the victory over the scale was complete, and 

 will practically remain so. The history of the introduction of 

 this pest ; its spread for upward of twenty years and the discour- 

 agement which resulted ; the numerous experiments which were 

 made to overcome the insect ; and its final reduction to unimpor- 

 tant 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 ento- 

 mology. 



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. cegyptiacum). We hope soon to be 

 able to send the same insect to India, where it has recently trans- 

 pired that Icerya cegyptiacum occurs ; while recent information 

 received from. Phra Suriya, Royal Commissioner of Siam, at Chi- 

 cago, 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 

 important, and resulted in the saving to California of an indus- 

 try 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 entomolo- 

 gists 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 preda- 

 ceous species, not to mention fungous and bacterial diseases. From 

 an extreme of comparative incredulity the farmer and fruit- 

 grower have gone, perhaps, to the other extreme of too great 



