18 PARASITES OF GIPSY AND BROWN-TAIL MOTHS. 



Boisgiraud, of Poitiers, France, in 1840. Prof. Trotter found this 

 reference in a little-known paper by N. Joly, published in 1842, and 

 entitled " Notice of the Ravages which Liparis dispar L. has made 

 around Toulouse, followed by some Reflexions upon a Method of 

 Destroying Certain Insects." It seems that Boisgiraud, about 1840. 

 freed the poplars along a road near Poitiers of the gipsy moth by 

 placing upon them the carabid beetle Calosoma sycophanta L., and 

 destroyed earwigs in his own garden by placing with them a rove 

 beetle (Staphylinus olens Mull). He also experimented against the 

 same insect with the ground beetle Carabus auratus L. His experi- 

 ment must have become rather well known at the time, since Prof. 

 Trotter points out that in 1843 the technical commission of the 

 Society for the Encouragement of Arts and Crafts of Milan offered a 

 gold medal to be given in 1845 to the person who in the meantime 

 should have undertaken with some success new experiments tending to 

 promote the artificial development of some species of carnivorous 

 insects which could be used efficaciously to destroy another species of 

 insect recognized as injurious to agriculture. This offer drew forth a 

 memoir from Antonio Villa, a well-known writer on entomology, who 

 had previously confined himself to the Coleoptera, entitled "The Car- 

 nivorous Insects used to Destroy the Species Injurious to Agricul- 

 ture." This memoir was presented December 26, 1844, and he advo- 

 cated the emplo}^ment of climbing carabid beetles for tree-inhabiting 

 forms, rove beetles to destroy the insects found in flowers, and ground 

 beetles for cutworms and other earth-inhabiting forms. The paper 

 of Villa was praised in certain reviews and criticized in others. It 

 seems to have been entirely lost sight of in later years. 



A later Italian writer, Rondani, who devoted himself for the most 

 part to systematic work, appreciated the practical imjDortance of 

 parasite work and published tables giving the host relations of differ- 

 ent species. His work influenced many arguments in the dispute 

 which sprang up in Italy about 1868 as to the usefulness of insec- 

 tivorous birds to agriculture, and Silvestri calls attention to the fact 

 that Dr. T. Bellenghi was referring to Rondani when, in 1872, he spoke 

 what Silvestri calls "the prophetic words:" "Entomological para- 

 sitism has a future, and in it more than in anything else Italian agri- 

 culture must put its faith." 



PERMITTING THE PARASITES TO ESCAPE. 



The earliest published suggestion as to the practical use of para- 

 sites of injurious insects, by permitting the parasites to escape while 

 the host insect is killed, appears to have been made by C. V. Riley 

 when State entomologist of Missouri. Writing of the rascal leaf- 

 crumpler (Mineola indiginella Zell.) in his Fourth Report on the 



