a personal visit to Florida last spring, and several lines of 

 experimental work undertaken in the hope of finding some 

 cheaper and more effective insecticide than the one noAV gener- 

 ally in use. In this same connection I have provided for a 

 general inspection of nurseries throughout the State, made at 

 the expense of the nurserymen. Upon receipt of the report of 

 the condition of these nurseries from my inspectors, I have 

 given to nurserymen official certificates setting forth the facts as 

 to the existence on their premises of insects likely to be con- 

 veyed in trade to the injury of their customers. 



The operations of the Biological Station have been carried 

 on during the past two years along lines practically the same as 

 those previously reported upon, except that we have done much 

 more during the last two years with fishes than previously, with 

 the expectation of completing a formal report upon the fishes of 

 Illinois on which considerable progress had been made by me 

 long before the opening of the Station. 



This study of the fishes of the Station field was taken up 

 systematically in July, 1897, by Prof. Frank Smith, and con- 

 tinued by him without interruption until September 1 of that 

 year. In the summer of 1898 this was passed over to Mr. 

 Wallace Craig, assigned to the Biological Station as its resident 

 naturalist, and he will make this his principal occupation dur- 

 ing this entire year. He has been handsomely provided with 

 various kinds of apparatus for the collection of fishes in all the 

 Station situations, including seines of all sorts, fish traps of 

 various size and construction, set nets, and trammel nets. 

 This work is being so conducted as to give us correct ideas not 

 only of the species occurring at the Station, but of their relative 

 abundance and local distribution, their haunts, their habits, 

 their regular migrations and irregular movements, their breed- 

 ing times and places, their rate of growth, their food, their 

 diseases and their enemies, and, in short, the whole economy of 

 each kind there represented and of the whole assemblage taken 

 together as a community group. 



Extensive studies of the aquatic entomology of the situation 

 have also been made, and an elaborate paper on ephemerids and 

 dragon-flies, the joint contribution of Messrs. Hart and Adams, 

 of the Laboratory stnft", and of Professor J, G. Needham, who 



