MINUTES OF BLEVENTH ANNUAL MEETING 15 
REPORT OF ECOLOGICAL COMMITTEE 
To the State Academy of Science: 
I have first to report the reorganization of the State work 
heretofore carried on by the State Laboratory of Natural His- 
tory and the State Entomologist’s Office, these being now united 
under the name of the Natural History Survey of the State as a 
division of the State Department of Registration and Educa- 
tion. The functions of this Survey are the same as those of the 
offices which it supersedes, except that they now cover both the 
botany and the zoology of the state comprehensively, and that 
the term botany is made to include forestry and plant path- 
ology, in which no state survey work has heretofore been done. 
The management and staff of the Natural History Survey re- 
main as before, but its work is placed under the control of com- 
mittees made up of the director of the Department, the chief 
of the Survey, the vice-president of the University of Illinois, 
Professor John M. Coulter, of the University of Chicago, and 
Professor Wm. Trelease, of the University of Illinois. The 
whole field of the biology of the state is thus covered in all its 
aspects and bearings, scientific, educational, and economic. 
The current work of this Survey during the past year has 
been largely a study and organization of our recently accumu- 
lated chemical and biological data from the Illinois and the 
Des Plaines rivers and from the Sanitary Canal, brought into 
comparison with the biological and chemical data obtained be- 
fore the opening of the canal with a view to an analysis of the 
effects of that revolutionary event upon biology of the Illinois 
River system. This work is still in progress, but some of the 
principal conclusions reached concerning spring and summer 
conditions can now be stated. 
We find that the original sewage load of the upper Illinois 
has been somewhat more than doubled since 1899* as measured 
in kilograms of chlorine per second carried by this stream in 
its downward flow, but that the sewage in the upper river is 
now much more dilute and very much fresher than in the 
earlier period. These latter differences are largely due, of 
*The Sanitary Canal, it will be remembered, was first opened in January, 1900. 
