29 
the meeting of the Board, June 1, and subsequent to that 
meeting $250 more. I consequently engaged the necessary as- 
sistants, enlarged our facilities, and published a general notice 
to those interested of my willingness to receive live chinch 
bugs and return infected ones in their place, using for this pur- 
pose the Associated Press, June 5, 1894, and sending out through 
the Experiment Station office a press bulletin on ‘‘The Chinch 
Bug in Illnois,” dated June 7. This offer was most eagerly 
accepted by a very large number of farmers, and we were pres- 
ently very nearly overwhelmed—as were also the local express 
offices and the post-office—by packages of chinch bugs arriving 
from all parts of the State, and in all imaginable conditions. 
In order to avail myself of the much larger experience of the 
Kansas Station, I followed precisely, at first, the infection 
methods there in use, depending upon an exposure of the 
chinch bugs to insects dead with the disease and covered with 
the characteristic fungus growth; and to make assurance doubly 
sure I had obtained a supply of material directly from the Kan- 
sas State University, although we had the same fungus in our 
own infection boxes at the time. Notwithstanding the great 
enlargement of our facilities, and the continuous expert atten- 
tion which the whole subject received, especially from Mr. 
John Marten, who has had principal charge of our disease ex- 
periments for four years, the contagion did not spread rapidly 
enough in our boxes to make it possible to meet at once more 
than a small percentage of the demand. I found later that a 
part of this slow development was due to a difficulty which 
seems not to have been previously noticed by any one here or 
elsewhere; namely, the appearance in our infection boxes of 
swarms of minute mites which fed upon the fungus as fast as it 
was developed. 
Next, observing that the thirteen-year locusts, which were 
rapidly disappearing, had many of them died with this disease, 
and bore a profuse growth of the characteristic fungus in excel- 
lent condition, I had a large quanity of these collected, and 
used these dead locusts for distribution, accompanied in each 
case by chinch bugs which had been exposed to the infection. 
Finally, having ascertained, as a result of experiments made — 
previously and also at the time, that the cultivated fungus 
grown upon a mixture of corn meal and beef broth is in every 
