INTRODUCTION. 
Tuis is intended primarily for a report of the work done at 
the Experimental Station during the year 1896. But since the 
legislature made no appropriation for the Station for the years 
1897-’98 and 1898-’99, it has been deemed appropriate to in- 
clude in this report a resumé of our operations with insect dis- 
eases since the beginning of our experiments in 1889. The 
publication of this report has been delayed, so that an account 
of observations and experiments carried on in the present year 
(1897) by the departments of botany and entomology of the 
University may also be included. 
The Experimental Station of the University of Kansas for the 
consideration of chinch-bug diseases began its work in the spring 
of 1891. In that year, and in each succeeding year, thousands 
of lots of infected chinch-bugs have been distributed over the 
3 state. Infection has been introduced many times over in all 
the counties of the state, except in a few in the extreme west 
devoted chiefly to cattle grazing and where injury from chinch- 
bugs is of trifling extent. Besides the tens of thousands of 
packages of diseased bugs sent from this Station directly to in-, 
dividuals, innumerable others have been distributed by sub- 
stations conducted by counties or private persons; and, in other 
innumerable instances, farmers have supplied themselves from 
fields of their neighbors where fungus-covered bugs could be 
had for the trouble of picking them up. In all that portion of 
the state — about three-fourths of its area — where chinch-bugs 
are known and dreaded, there is scarcely a square mile that has 
not had the Sporotrichum germs scattered upon it. 
This thorough sprinkling of the state with spores of chinch- 
bug diseases has led also to the very desirable result of making 
the farmers familiar with the effects of the diseases and the ap- 
pearance of insects infected with them. In 1889, when our ex- 
periments began, there was not a single farmer in the state, so 
far as we know, who could have told what was the matter with 
a Sporotrichum- or Empusa-covered chinch-bug, or who even knew 
that the little whitish particle had ever been an insect at all. 
(5) 
Ee tees ee 
