rejection  and  to  crush  with  improvident  foot  and  without  dis- 
tinction his  natural  helpers  togetner  with  his  natural  enemies/' 
The  work  of  Villa,  praised  in  principle  and  method  in  the  vari- 
ous Italian  and  foreign  periodicals  which  reviewed  it,  received 
aiso  bitter  criticisms  not  immune  as  it  seems  from  personalities, 
specially  on  the  part  of  Carlo  Bassi,  another  Milanese  naturalist, 
an  acquaintance  if  not  a friend  of  Villa.  In  his  criticism  he  al- 
lowed himself  to  be  influenced  too  much  by  a brief  statement  of 
Ratzeburg. 
The  celebrated:  entomologist,  author  of  the  classical  work  Die 
Ichneumonen  der  Forst-Insecten  (1844),  speaking  of  carnivorous 
insects  wrote  that  they  can  be  applied  to  the  needs  of  agriculture 
only  by  the  beneficient  hand  of  nature,  and  that  every  effort  to 
assist  it  must  be  in  vain. 
Against  the  often  biting  criticism  of  Bassi,  which  was  in  many 
points  rather  unfounded  and  puerile,  G.  Stabile  rose  with  an 
article  in  sympathetic  defence  and  shortly  thereafter  also  Villa 
himself.  Later  on,  that  is  in  1847,  he  found  himself  compelled  to 
give  a new  reply  in  consequence  of  another  criticism  by  Bassi, 
who  was  joined  by  the  noted  physician  Bellani,  drawing  into  his 
recriminations,  without  any  good  reasons,  a previous  work  of 
Villa  on  locusts.  (End  of  quotation  from  Trotter.  Trans.) 
Since  1850,  Rondani,  the  Italian  entomologist,  a man  of  genius, 
takes  first  rank  as  a student  of  insect  parasites,  having  studied  in 
particular  Dipterous  and  Hymenopherous  parasites  and  ento- 
mology in  general.  He  fully  appreciated  the  importance  of 
entomophagous  insects  in  fighting  the  injurious  ones  and,  in 
order  to  secure  appreciation  also  among  agriculturists,  he  tried  to 
show  them  the  number  of  the  one  kind  and  the  other,  by  publish- 
ing his  “Account  of  Parasitic  Insects  and  Their  Victims”  in  two 
parts,  giving  in  the  first  a table  of  parasites  known  as  enemies 
of  injurious  insects  and  in  the  second  a table  of  harmful  insects 
and  their  parasites. 
In  many  places  in  his  publications  Rondani  calls  the  attention 
of  agriculturists  to  their  natural  assistants  in  the  fight  against 
phytophagous  insects  and  in  the  memorandum  entitled  “The  Birds 
and  the  Injurious  Insects”  he  expresses  himself  as  follows: 
“These  (the*  parasitic  insects)  are  the  true  friends  and  allies  of 
the  agriculturist  although  little  or  poorly  understood  and  there- 
fore, persecuted  through  ignorance  . They  are  the  most  power- 
ful, if  not  the  only  means  of  which  nature  avails  herself  to  main- 
tain the  equilibrium  among  the  species  that  live  together  on  this 
earth  because  not  one  of  them  can  increase  very  much  without  be- 
coming fatal  to  others;  it  is  through  these  that  the  devastations  of 
other  insects  injurious  to  fields,  gardens  or  forests,  do  not  be- 
come complete,  or  are  limited  or  cease  altogether;  not  so  much  is 
this  the  case  with  birds  to  whom  the  policing  of  the  fields  can  not 
be  entrusted,  because  they  are  unreliable  and  kill  the  guilty  to- 
gether with  the  innocent,  they  are  robbers  as  well  as  guardians  of 
