Repository: UIHistories Project: Board of Trustees Minutes - 1888 [PAGE 187]

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190

UNIVEKSITY OF ILLINOIS.

is well under way of a similar but more important disease of Indian corn found by us widely prevalent from.Edwards to Kankakee counties. Careful and elaborate studies are also in progress of the bacteria and other plant parasites which we have found to cause contagious diseases among insects—those of the chinch bug having been investigated with especial thoroughness.

OFFICE WORK.

The office assistants have been chiefly engaged on the correspondence, in the preparation of the manuscript for the entomological report, and for the bulletins published since 1886, in proof reading of these and of the volume on the ornithology of the State—the latter read twice because once destroyed by fire—in the cataloguing and indexing of new books and periodicals received, in the preparation of two elaborate bibliographies—one including all the entomological writings of our first two State Entomologists, Walsh and LeBaron, and the other covering the entire literature of the chinch bug—in making the numerous charts, diagrams, and drawings and in illustration of lectures, especially those to farmers' institutes, in collecting from nearly nine hundred township assessors the facts concerning chinch-bug injury to the principal farm crops, in abstracting from the assessors' reports for 1887 the estimates of acreage in each crop for all townships in the State, and in collating and tabulating this mass of information—a work which occupied the time of two assistants for many weeks of the current summer and autumn. Under this head should also come the care of the entomological breeding room, by Mr. Hart, the preparation, determination and arrangement of the thousands of specimens collected, and the keeping of the voluminous records, catalogues and indexes of collections.

PUBLICATIONS.

Our regular publications run in four series, two from the Laboratory and two from the office of the State Entomologist—the former comprising the State Zoological Report and the bulletins of the State Laboratory of Natural History, and the latter the biennial entomological report and the bulletins of the entomological office. During the past two years we have finished the printing of the first volume on the zoology of the State, containing 520 pages of text and 46 plates, devoted to the ornithology of Illinois, as far as the water birds. This is a reprint of the volume, the first edition having been all destroyed in the burning of the office of the State Printer last February.