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STORY

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LPrinted by authority of the State of Illinois.)

ILLINOIS DEPARTMENT OF NATURAL HISTORY
_ REGISTRATION AND EDUCATION Survey DIvIsion

Clean Up the Chinch-Bug.

At the present time chinch-bugs are sufficiently abundant over
nearly one-fifth of the State to cause serious crop losses next spring
if the weather is at all favorable to their development. The whole or

A winter harborage of chinch-bugs.

EE —— ir

parts of the following counties are seriously infested: Bond, Calhoun,
Clay, Clinton, Effingham, Fayette, Greene, Jasper, Jersey, Macoupin,
Madison, Marion, Monroe, Montgomery, Perry, Randolph, Richland,

F

Lif
¢ U. OF HLL. UB.

2

St. Clair, and Washington; and many of the adjoining counties have
a slight to moderate infestation.

‘That the chinch-bug is capable of destroying all the corn and
greatly reducing the yield of small grains and grass, is not questioned
by any one who has had experience with the insect. It is of the
greatest importance, not only to these counties but to the State as a
whole, and even to the Nation, that we take every means possible to
prevent a chinch-bug outbreak at this time.

There are three general measures that can be taken to reduce
chinch-bug damage: First, the destruction of the bugs in their winter
quarters; second, the use of crops which will not be extensively
injured and will tend to reduce the numbers of bugs; and third, the
destruction of the bugs at the time of wheat harvest. It is with the
first of these measures that this circular deals.

During the winter, chinch-bugs may be found in nearly any
moderately dry shelter. They are most abundant, however, along the
south and west sides of hedge and brushy fence rows, ditch banks,
the edges of woodlands, brush or briar patches in neglected fields or
pastures, and especially in the bases of any of the bunch-forming
grasses, such as blue-stem, or prairie-grass. They will be found in
moderate to large numbers in and under bases of corn shocks and in
small numbers behind the lower leaves of standing corn.

Half a day spent in going over the average farm, using a news-
paper or, better, a grain sack, on which samples of the trash from the
above-mentioned situations can be examined, will locate the places_
where the bugs are most abundant. Having located them, advantage
should be taken of every dry period during the winter and early spring
to burn off the cover in these places. This should be done as early
in the winter as possible, in order to expose to the weather the bugs
not killed by the fire, so that a second or third burning may be done
later in places where the bugs have reassembled. The best results
will be had on days when the cover is dry enough to burn to the
ground and when the wind is not strong. It has not generally been
found profitable-to burn corn stalks, as by the time they have been
broken down and raked into windrows they are very few bugs remain-
ing in them.

Experiments made in the part of Hie State now infested have
shown that one thorough burning over of the usual places of chinch-
bug hibernation will kill from 50 to 75 per cent of the bugs.

.. Remember that every female chinch-bug killed this winter means,
on the average, 150 fewer in the wheat and corn next spring, and
11,250 fewer of the second brood in the corn next summer.

Ww) > 3

-

VO

It is needless to say that this work will have little effect in
reducing general chinch-bug injury next season if it is done by
scattered farmers here and there. To be successful it must be carried
out generally over the whole area infested; and each community
should organize and see that this work is done.

The places where the bugs are, and the destruction they may

Blue-stem, or bunch-grass, before burning.

cause next spring being known, every effort should be made to reduce
their numbers this winter. Food destroyed by insects is just as surely
lost as it is when an enemy spy fires a grain elevator, or a submarine
sinks a grain-laden ship. The man who harbors these: insect enemies
on his farm, no matter how unwillingly, but who makes no attempt
to destroy them, is certainly not doing all he can towards the winning
of the war.
WESLEY P. FLINT,
Chief Field Entomologist.

1231 W. Edwards Street,

Springfield, I1l.,

October 2, 1918.

_

ing

after burn

Tass,

or bunch-

-stem,

Blue

11585—10M

‘ScHNEPP & BARNES, STATE PRINTERS
| SPRINGFIELD, ILL.

1919.
-17691—2500

STATE OF ILLINOIS | |
RTMENT OF REGISTRATION AND EDUCATION

4 ra Forest and Stream
| in Illinois

A By STEPHEN A. FORBES, Ph. D., LL. D.
Chief of the Natural History Survey Division

[Printed by authority of the State of Illinois.]

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Ke aNS
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4 Baal rol att Al ay a RTS st be

STATE OF ILLINOIS
DEPARTMENT OF REGISTRATION AND EDUCATION

FRANCIS W. SHEPARDSON, Ph.D., LL.D., Director

STEPHEN A. FORBES, Ph.D., LL.D.,
Chief of the State Natural History Survey Division

THE BOARD OF NATURAL RESOURCES AND
CONSERVATION

FRANCIS W. SHEPARDSON, PH.D., LL.D., Director of Registration
and Education, Springfield, Chairman, ez officio.

DaviID KINLEY, PH.D., University Dean, Urbana, representing the
President of the University of Illinois, ex officio.

JOHN W. ALvorD, C. E., Engineer, ‘Chicago, representing Water
Resources.

THOMAS C. CHAMBERLIN, PH.D., Sc.D., LL.D., University of Chi-
cago, Chicago, representing Geology.

JOHN M. CouLtTEerR, PH.D., LL.D., University of Chicago, Chicago,
representing Forestry.

WILLIAM A. NoYES, PH.D., LL.D., University of Illinois, Urbana,
representing Water.

WILLIAM 'TRELEASE, Sc.D., LL.D., University of Illinois, Urbana,
representing Natural History.

FOREST AND STREAM IN ILLINOIS *

[By StepHEeNn A. Forses, Chief of the State Natural
History Survey.]|

I come to you this evening with a very definite pur-
pose, that of asking the interest of the Academy, and
of this representative audience in general, in certain
measures intended to improve the conditions of life
for the people of Illinois. The topic I have chosen for
a very superficial treatment—all that my time permits
—is that of the forests and streams of the State,
such as they were a hundred years ago, such as they
have now become under our management or neglect,
and such as we hope to leave them to our descendants
of a hundred years hereafter.

Stream and forest are so frequently associated here
in Illinois that where we see a forest we naturally look
for a stream somewhere within its heart, and where we
see a river we expect to see a forest bordering or im-
bedding it. And yet, the two are in many respects at
quite opposite extremes. A forest is stable, stolid, and
old. An old tree is, I suppose, the oldest living thing
in the world. It digs deep into the earth and brings
to expression all the properties of all the soils in which
it grows; it has concentrated in its trunk and in its
tissues a permanent record of the weather, the seasons,
the climates, of centuries—of milleniums, perhaps, in
such giants as the red woods, it preserves unchanged
in its heartwood particles deposited there a quarter of
a century or more ago.

A flowing stream, on the other hand, is the imme-
diate product of its immediate environment, respond-
ing quickly to rainfall, to drouth, to changes in tem-
perature, and even to the unstable winds. Its material
substance is rarely more than a few weeks, perhaps
only a few days, old. In the complexity of its sensi-
bilities and the variety of its responses, it is so much
like a living thing that one needs to be a biologist to

* Read December 8, 1918, at an open meeting of the Chi-

cago Academy of Sciences, held in celebration of the hundredth
anniversary of the admission of Illinois into the Union.

study and to understand it. And to the biologist both
stream and forest are captivating subjects of inquiry,
for to him a river is not water only and a forest is not
wholly made up of trees. Each is an environment and
its content. The birds and insects, the shrubs and an-
nual plants of a forest area are as much a part of the
forest as are the trees themselves, all being brought
and held therein—an associate group, an ecological
society—by conditions as compelling as those which
assemble men in cities; and the plants and plankton of
a river, its crustaceans, clams, turtles, fishes, and even
its water birds, are there just as the water is in and on
which they live, because the special features of the
particular environment impel or compel them into each
others’ company in permanent association.

So, when I speak of the study of a river or of a
forest survey I must ask you to think of them as a
survey, a study, of this kind of a forest, of a river in
this sense of the word.

THE FOREST

A hundred years ago, according to the careful esti-
mate of one of the most competent Illinois botanists
of the last century,* 30 per cent. of the area of this
so-called Prairie State—some ten or eleven million
acres, in other words—was covered by trees. Just
how much of this forest primeval remains to-day in
Illinois we have no means of knowing at all exactly.
After a general survey of our more important forests
made in 1908-10, the total woodland area of the State
was estimated at two million acres; but the U. S.
Census of 1910 reports over three million acres of
forest still remaining on what the Census Bureau calls
farms—that is, on tracts of land each under one man-
agement, on some part of which farm products are be-
ing raised; and we get no hint of the area of additional
forest properties on which no farm crops are grown.
All are agreed, however, that such forests as we have
remaining—a possible third of our original heritage—
are being commonly mismanaged, or rather not man-
aged at all. Neither the State nor the owner of forest
lands has any definite forest policy. “While our wood-
fands contain a large variety of valuable species, their
silvicultural condition is very poor, and their pro-
ductive capacity is much below normal owing to short-

* Dr. Frederick Brendel, of Peoria.

6

sighted methods of cutting and to injury from grazing
and fire. Their ownership is favorable to forest man-
agement, but there is little appreciation of the possi-
bility and advantage of increased yield by proper
methods of treatment, and practically all industries de-
pendent on local timber supplies are on the decline.”
And this abuse of our present holdings is not by any .
means the worst of our errors. A vast acreage has
been cleared of trees and brought under the plow
which ought to have been left in forests permanently.
The Soil Survey of Illinois has now made progress
sufficient to warrant general statements concerning the
State as a whole, and from the director of this survey
I learn that there are about six million acres of Illi-
nois land that either are or ought to be permanently
in trees, the soils of this great tract—25 per cent.
larger than the whole State of Connecticut—being bet-
ter adapted to the growth of trees than to any other
agricultural use, and its broken surfaces making it
liable to virtual ruin by erosion when brought under
the plow. Much of it has, indeed, already been so
ruined, and more of it has been abandoned after un-
profitable attempts to cultivate it as farm land. The
“abandoned lands of Illinois” is an expression strange
to the ears of most of us, who still think of the State
as an area of inexhaustible fertility.

We have already begun to search for a remedy for
these conditions. Besides a commercial survey of
twenty-six counties made in 1908-10 to which I have
already alluded—a survey made conjointly by the
United States Forest Service and the Natural History
Survey of the State—we have this year begun, with
the aid of a whole-hearted group of Illinois naturalists,
a survey of a much more thoroughgoing type. Several
members of the faculties of the University of Chicago,
the Northwestern University, the University of Illinois,
and the Eastern Illinois State Normal School, and the
teacher of botany in the Lake View High School in
Chicago, have given the State, without compensation,
large instalments of their vacation time, assisted also,
in several instances, by their graduate students work-
ing on the same generous terms; have made careful
surveys of the tree growths of selected tracts in
Jo Daviess, Cook, Vermilion, La Salle, Adams, Coles,
and Cumberland counties; and are now preparing re-
ports to be illustrated by photographs and maps for

nh
‘

publication in the Bulletin of the Natural History
Survey.

And we shall seek this winter to secure the perma-
nent appointment of a forestry expert as a State for-
ester, and shall then turn him loose in the State to
study the situation, to interview, to lecture, and to
publish in a general educational campaign, and to come
to conclusions as to what it is best to do for forestry
in Illinois, so that two years hence we may have a
rational, correct, and well-settled program of conser-
vation and development to present to the Governor
and the Legislature for their consideration.

It is our plan to survey not merely the present
forest areas, but to cover all the broken country
especially adapted to the growth of trees, coming to
conclusions as to the best use to be made of each tract
of land, the kinds of trees with which it might best be
planted, the rate of growth of the more important
species in each situation and in each kind of soil, and
the returns to be expected from forest culture in com-
parison with other uses of this land. And we shall not
for a moment leave out of sight the fact that an IIli-
nois forest is much more than an equipment for
money-making, that it is often of greater use for edu-
cational, recreational, and esthetic purposes, as in
parks and other places of public and private resort,
than it is for the production of wealth; and all these
various values must be taken into account in a public
survey. The life of a forest as a whole, and not of its
trees alone, and all the ways, whatever they may be, in
which our forest lands may be made valuable to man,
are the real subjects of study in a thoroughgoing
survey. It is such a survey as this that we hope to
see established in Illinois—one which will bring to
bear upon its problems and applications the highest
science, the soundest practical judgment, the shrewd-
est private enterprise, and the finest public spirit of
our people; and it is for such a survey that I have to
ask the approval and the assistance of this Academy,
and of all those concerned to whom these presents
may come.

THE RIVER

The problem of the protection, utilization, and de-
velopment of our aquatic resources is much more com-
plicated and difficult than that of our forests, because

8

there are many discordant interests centered along our
water courses—commercial fisheries interests; the in-
terests of the sporting fisherman, the two often an-
tagonistic; a great agricultural interest in the enclos-
ure reclamation, and cultivation of land subject to
overflow; manufacturing interests, which poison the
streams with the wastes of huge factories; municipal
interests, which find in the nearest river the most con-
venient and the cheapest means of sewage disposal,
and the interest of those who live beside the stream,
or resort to it for labor, business, or pleasure, that it
shall be kept inoffensive if not inviting, and healthful
if not altogether clean.

Permit me to take, as a marked example, the largest
river of the State, the one from which Illinois derives
its name. Two hundred and seventy-three miles in
length, formed by the junction of the Kankakee River
and the Des Plaines, and receiving now a large con-
tribution of Lake Michigan water by way of Chicago
River and the drainage canal of the Sanitary District
of Chicago, it may be said to rise at the very gates of
this great city. It is in many ways a remarkable
stream, unlike any other in the country. “It is pecu-
liarly characteristic of the State of Illinois, and next to
its prairies, was its leading natural feature. Its broad
bottom-lands, the bed of a former outlet of the Great

‘Lakes system; covered with huge trees, completely

flooded when the river is highest and holding many
marshes and shallow lakes at its lowest stages, are a
relic of the time, not so very far removed, when the
limpid waters of the great glacial lakes rolled down its
valley in a mighty flood on their course to the south-
ern gulf. It gave to the discoverers of Illinois the
first means of access to our territory, and on its banks

_ was built the first fortified post. It was the first great
_ artery of transportation into and through the State,

and among the first colonial settlements were those
established on its banks.” It was, until recently, and
perhaps is yet, by far the richest river in the country
in the product of purely fresh-water fisheries. Ac-
cording to the U. S. Census its yield in fishes only, in
1908, was equivalent to a dollar for every two feet of
its length in prices paid to fishermen, or in those paid
by the consumer, to more than two dollars for each
foot. Its frequently beautiful and occasionally pictur-
esque scenery is attracting more attention every year,

9

‘
~~ SS

and the time is surely at hand when the people of Ih-
nois will learn to appreciate and develop this great
gift of nature in the various directions in which it may
be made to serve their interests‘and their pleasures.

Just now, however, it is at the very lowest estate of
its whole history. Virtually all the sewage of Chicago
is delivered to it, and the same may be said of every
city and town upon its banks. By diking and drainage
operations it is being robbed of the haunts of its water
birds and the principal breeding-grounds and feeding-
grounds of its fishes, and corn will presently be grow-
ing every year on some 200,000 acres of forest, marsh,
and lake over which its waters spread a few years ago
in time of flood.

A brief outline of a few of the main features of
its recent biological history will help you to see what
is happening to it and why, and what ought to be done
by us if we are to give to our descendants of the com-
ing century as much as we should of the values which
came into the hands of our predecessors a hundred
years ago.

A critical moment in the history of the stream was
January 17, 1900, when, by the opening of the drain-
age canal of the Sanitary District of Chicago, the IIli-
nois again became, after a lapse of ages, a partial out-
let to the waters of the Great Lakes. The flow through
the two canals, the Illinois and Michigan and the sani-
tary canal, both deriving their waters from the same
source, was equal in 1913 to the average natural flow
of the river at Peoria, a hundred and ten miles down
stream. This increment from the canals is of course
virtually constant at all seasons of the year, while the
natural flow of the stream varies greatly from time to
time, with the result that, when the river is lowest,
about four-fifths of its water comes from Lake Michi-
gan, and when it is highest, only about a tenth, the
ratio of Michigan water to that derived from the wa-
tershed of the stream, rising and falling inversely to
the rise and fall of the river gages. The river conse-
quently can not now fall as low, under like conditions,
as before 1900, the rising river begins sooner to spread
over its bottomlands, the overflows are more extensive,
the bottom-land lakes are filled to a greater depth and
cover a larger area, and the water recedes more slowly
after a rise, all these effects being necessarily more

10

Ww

obvious and pronounced on the upper smaller part of
the stream than on the lower larger part.

Now, the productivity of a river depends, other
things being equal, upon the area of shallow water
along its banks and draining freely into it from its
border-lands, for it is in such shallow water that plant
and animal life is, generally speaking, most abundant.
The immediate effect of the opening of the canal must
consequently have been to increase the total yield of
the stream, and this conclusion is confirmed by many
comparative collections made by us by quantitative
methods for long periods before and after 1900.

Coincident, however, with this admission of lake
water to the river has come another powerful influ-
ence in the admission of the total sewage of Chicago
as carried by the canals; and this has worked in
opposite directions in the different parts of the stream.
The organic matter of the sewage in process of de-
composition so fouls the water of the upper river,
especially in midsummer, that its natural plant and
animal life is then virtually destroyed or displaced,
and characteristic sewage organisms take its place. I
quote from a survey report published by us in 1913:

“In the seventeen-mile section of the Illinois from
Morris, nine miles below its origin, to the upper dam
the river reaches its lowest point of pollutional dis-
tress, becoming, when very hot weather coincides with
a low stage of water, a thoroughly sick stream. Its
oxygen is-nearly all gone; its carbon dioxide rises to
the maximum; its sediments become substantially like
the sludge of a septic tank; its surface bubbles with
the gases of decomposition escaping from sludge banks
on its bottom; its odor is offensive; and its color
is gray with suspended specks and larger clusters of
sewage organisms carried down from the stony floor
of the polluted Des Plaines, or swept from their at-
tachments along the banks of the Illinois. On its
surface are also floating masses of decaying debris
borne up by the gases developing within them, and
covered and fringed with the ‘sewage fungus’ and the
bell animalcule usually associated in these waters. The
vegetation and drift at the edge of the stream are also
everywhere slimy with these foul-water plants and
minute filth-loving animals. * * *

“The normal life of the stream practically disap-
pears in the absence of oxygen; its fishes withdraw to

Lat

5 a ee a ee

neighboring unpolluted waters; its mollusks, crusta-
ceans, ordinary insect larvae and other more or less
sedimentary forms disappear to be replaced mainly by
slime-worms and Chironomus larvae in the sludge;
and its chlorophyll-bearing plants linger only along the
edges in shallow water. With the advent of cooler
weather and higher river levels, most of these marked
symptoms disappear, and a few fishes may even make
their way into the stream, particularly in the vicinity
of the motths of creeks. In spring and in fall, bub-
bling from the bottom ceases, the odor of the water is
no longer repellant, a few invertebrate animals reap-
pear, and the oxygen ratios rise to a considerable frac-
tion of those normal to the Kankakee. The extent of
this seasonal oscillation depends, of course, upon the
rainfall and temperature; and the opposite extreme is
reached in winter, when midstream oxygen ratios may
be fully as high as those of the summer time for Chil-
licothe and Peoria.”

A careful survey, chemical and biological, made
last August and September, showed us that the foul-
ing of the waters was extending steadily down stream
at an average rate, during the last six years, of five to
ten miles a year,* and that the Illinois River from its
origin at Dresden Heights to Peoria Lake, ninety-
three miles down, is now nearly deserted by fishes, at

* The recent degeneration of the Illinois River above Peoria
is shown by the following table, bringing into comparison the
oxygen content of the water over a sixty-mile stretch of the
river from Depue to Pekin as shown by analyses made in the
summers of 1911 and 1912 and again in July and August, 1918.

RATIOS OF DISSOLVED OXYGEN IN ILLINOIS RIVER WATER, STATED
IN PARTS PER MILLION, SUMMERS OF 1911 AND 1912 IN
COMPARISON WITH SUMMER OF 1918.

Parts per Parts per Ratio of

million million later period

Stations. 1911, 1912 1918. to earlier.
VST renee Mes alavioke Manaiene vabacalon ene aie 2.65 0.16 1—16.6
EVER SOU Fil idiiateiahee attain le dale Hlolie vee 2.41 0.25 1— 9.6
EVISTA titre! atte autehelvete ner oleMeita releterce 2.35 0.65 1— 38.6.
EO EN Haase aids euietekeh CHL Nile, teeters 2.45 0.92 1— 2.7
CHICO ena Ane ncaa S20 dba LG 1— 2.8
TPN eit a UBM DYE aE URN Ck DS) Me AVAIL Cd Lt aya (oa 2.08 1— 2.7

What these oxygen ratios signify as compared with those
of a tolerably clean water may be shown by a comparison of
them with the ratios of dissolved oxygen for the Kankakee and
with those of Depue Lake. August 21, 1911, the oxygen of the
Kankakee River just above its mouth stood at 8.47 parts per
million at 10 a.m., and at 10.15 parts per million at 2 p.m., the
increased ratio in the afternoon being due to the oxygen given
off by water-plants under the influence of sunshine; while in
Depue Lake, September 11, 1911, the oxygen ratio stood at 12.92
parts per million when that of the river just above the lake was
2.65 parts per million.

12

_

least in summer, its dominant life then being that of a
contaminate stream. Peoria Lake, however, a shallow
expanse of the river about seventeen miles long and
a mile and a half wide at its broadest part, serves at
present as a kind of a check valve against the ex-
tension of these conditions farther down the stream,
and in and below the lake the life of the river becomes
nearly normal. The sewage load of the stream is
steadily increasing year by year, however, and how
long it may be before this frail barrier is broken
through of course we can not say.

From another point of view, we may regard the
river water as a fluid and flowing soil, the basis of the
growth of aquatic organisms, and Chicago sewage as
a fertilizer enriching this soil and making it more pro-
ductive when the raw sewage elements have been
worked over by decay and oxygenation, and thus made
available as food for aquatic plants and animals, and
through them finally, by way of fishes especially, as
food for man. This process of conversion and assimi-
lation of the organic contents of a flowing stream of
course takes time, and time in a river means progress
downward; and it takes temperature also, proceeding
rapidly with midsummer heat and slowly in midwinter
cold. The current of the Illinois has been accelerated,
of course, by the volume of lake water added to it
by the canals, but it is still slow enough to give suf-
ficient time for the conversion of much Chicago sew-
age into available food by the time it has reached the
middle course of the stream, and this middle course is
also much the most important for fisheries. At pres-
ent, therefore, the Illinois fisherman and the consumer
of his fish have, ‘so far as we know, no definite reason
to complain of the total effect of the influx of city
sewage, for it has probably profited more than it has
injured them. Although it has destroyed the fishery
of the smaller, less important, upper hundred miles of
the river proper, it seems to have increased the yield’
of the eighty miles next following. It is especially be-
cause the pollution of the stream is increasing that we
have reason to apprehend more serious economic
consequences.

And now of recent years there has come on another
still more disturbing factor, that of the reclamation
and improvement of the rich river bottom-lands and
the drainage of many lakes whose beds are now fields

13

of corn. This process is inevitable because it is highly
profitable, bringing in returns much larger than could
be got in any other way; but it leaves the Illinois River
much as Samson was left when shorn of his locks
by the self-seeking Delilah. Already the annual yield
of the Illinois has fallen off at least one-half since
the last census data were obtained in 1908; and this
process is also progressive, although the greater part
of the bottom-lands which are reclaimable have now
been reclaimed. ‘The effect upon the river is to im-
poverish its biology in two different ways, by drying
up.its most productive waters and by hemming in its
flow in times of flood, thus speeding up its current so
that it carries its sewage content more rapidly down-
ward, leaving less time for its transformation and
utilization, and pouring it out unused at the mouth of
the stream in much larger ratio than formerly—an
enormous loss of food resources to the Illinois which
inures possibly to the benefit of the Mississippi, into
which our stream empties.

Such is a very sketchy description of only a part
of the vicissitudes to which the long-suffering Illinois
is being subjected during these latest years of its
checkered history, and there are more yet to follow.
What will probably be the biological effect of the
changes contemplated by the waterway engineers in
making the Illinois again a connecting link of trans-
portation between the Great Lakes and the Gulf, is a
subject for some other time and place.

And if you ask me what is to be done under the
circumstances in the public interest, I shall have to
answer that I do not know, but that I want to find out.
When present and prospective drainage projects are
completed, there will still remain, in the Illinois valley
below La Salle, 170,000 acres under water or subject
to overflow at times of highest flood, a valuable fish-
eries property in itself and capable, as we may believe,
of material improvement if intelligently handled in the
public interest. Some day we shall have, and I hope,
quite soon, a fisheries experiment station on the Illh-
nois equipped to do for the important streams of the
State and for the great rivers which nearly surround
it, something like what the agricultural experiment
station does for Illinois farm lands. We have in hand
such a project, in fact, for which we propose fish
ponds and a headquarters building on land, and with

14

the other equipment, chemical, biological, and prac-
tical, mainly on houseboats similar to the floating
laboratory of biology which we have had for more
than twenty years on the Illinois, all capable of being
shifted from place to place, as may be necessary, in
our extensive field. By the general and special studies
possible with such an equipment, a policy of manage-
ment and control should be worked out in the general
interest, such as an intelligent and resourceful owner
would establish if our public waters were his private
property. f
The problem of streams pollution consequent on
current methods of sewage disposal lies, of course,
quite outside the field of our Natural History Survey ;

‘ but any citizen may say, as I do now, that the intelli-

gence, conscience, public spirit, money, and power of
the city of Chicago and of the other municipalities
concerned are surely sufficient for its solution. A
people which will do in a spirit of boundless self-
sacrifice what we have done in the past two years for
the welfare of foreign nations, will not balk perma-
nently at the few millions needed to make our waters
wholesome, clean, and physically decent for the use
of the people of Illinois; and I believe that this
Academy may help materially to hasten the day when
the law of the State forbidding the pollution or defile-
ment of any stream or lake in Illinois by the deposit,
addition, or discharge therein of any foul or injurious
substance such that fish and other aquatic life is de-
stroyed, may be fairly and wisely enforced by the State
department upon which that duty now rests.

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