Grassi, Giovanni Battista

Giovanni Grassi (Fig. 48) was born in the province of Como, Italy, on March 27, 1854. He was educated at the universities of Pavia and Messina (Italy) and Heidelberg and Würzburg (Germany). In 1883 he was appointed professor of zoology, anatomy, and comparative zoology at Università di Catania, and in 1895 he was appointed to a similar position at Università di Roma. His works began on intestinal worms, proceeded to Protozoa (especially of termites), continued with flies (1883, “Malefizi delle mosche”) as vectors of eggs of nematodes and spores of fungi, on embryology of the honey bee, morphology and phylogeny of arthropods, the biology of termites, the transmission of malaria by Anopheles mosquitoes, the life history of Phlebotomus, on the grapevine pest Phylloxera, and on chaetognaths, marine eels, and development of the vertebral column. In 1908 he was made a member of the Italian senate. In 1884–1889 he studied Thysanura, Scolopendrella, and Koenema mirabilis, the last being an...