Howes's real concern, however, was with insects. He was already busily at work. The fascinating leaf-carrying ants had of course attracted him. He had

Guacharo eggs and nest.

found a colony which seemed to be carrying on its work by relays-sufficient time has not elapsed to make his observations more than provisional. Some of the ants had ascended a tree, and cut off many leaves which dropped to the ground. Here other ants took them and carried them to a spot in the road where they made a pile of them; and from this heap they were removed by yet a third set of workers. He had just run across a wasp which was closely related to one of our paper-making wasps, polistes, but which built. a mud nest containing one or more cells and fed its young almost as a bird would. It brought to the larval grubs live geometric caterpillars. It did not chew them up and feed them to its young piecemeal, as some of our wasps do, nor, as is the habit of others, paralyze them and store them up in a sealed cell with the larva, but fed them to the larva one at a time and alive.

Taken as a whole, this zoological research station offers a chance for original and productive work such as has not hitherto been even attempted. It rep

resents the effort to strike out on a new line, and the results may be, and I think will be, of the utmost value. It always needs both boldness of conception and very hard work to carry through anything which is entirely original; people naturally like to do both their thinking and their acting along the grooves with which they are familiar. It is earnestly to be hoped that public-spirited laymen who are interested in science will continue to back the undertaking, which has been rendered possible only by the generosity of five of their number. It is also to be hoped that in addition to the present director of the station and his associates, other nat

Young guacharo in nest.

uralists, trained in both the study and the field, will go down to the station to carry on investigations into special subjects. No man should go unless he is thoroughly trained in both types of work-enthusiasm is not a substitute for training, nor training for wide intelligence. But Messrs.

Osborn, Hornaday, and Grant, who are responsible for starting this research station on the edge of the great tropical wilderness, have announced that they will welcome to it all biological investigators of the right type, and the chance is too good to be lost. The government of British Guiana, with characteristic broadmindedness, is granting every facility to the station; and the generosity of Mr. G. B. Withers has given it excellent quarters without cost.

In Trinidad, whither I went after leaving Demerara, I met several out-of-doors naturalists. One of them was Mr. Eugene André, the botanist, who in his exploration of the Cana River, in Venezuela, so nearly lost his life; for the genuine explorers of his stamp, who penetrate into the untrodden tropical wilderness of South America,

on frogs. Other species eat indiscriminately all living things of suitable size. Others when young feed on entirely different animals from those they kill when full grown. Yet others vary individually for inscrutable reasons. Thus some of Mr. Mole's boas would eat only rats, and others would eat only rabbits.

risk the extremes of hazard and hardship. He took me to see Mr. R. R. Mole, who has made a special study of the snakes of Trinidad. He possessed living specimens of a dozen different species, and also of the huge bird-killing spider, and of centipeds a foot long; these sinister invertebrates were fed chiefly on large cockroaches, but they attack small vertebrates without hesitation, and in several instances, of which the details were given me, my friends had seen both the giant spider and the giant centiped kill mice and lizards.

Among the snakes were fair-sized boaconstrictors and anacondas; the latter were said to be much more irritable than the former. Anacondas, moreover, grow to a much larger size. Some species of snakes feed only on certain kinds of animals-mammals, or birds, or reptiles, or insects and even only on more limited groups, as, for example, on other snakes or

The

big anacondas, when hungry, mastered formidable things. A nine-foot anaconda in his possession swallowed a three-foot alligator; and in the stomach of a fifteen-foot anaconda he found the teeth of an alligator which must have been over seven feet long. young boas would eat only lizards.

Some

I was much interested at seeing a representative of my old Brazilian friend, the mussurama, the devourer of other snakes, poisonous or non-poisonous. I asked Mr. Mole if it par

alleled the friendliness of the Brazilian form to men; he in answer opened the cage containing it and handed it to me to hold. This is by no means the only snakeeating snake in Trinidad; there is also the cribo, which is said likewise to be immune to poison, but which is a less finished killer than the mussurama.

I was especially interested in the two most deadly of the poisonous snakes: the great bushmaster, which among poisonous serpents is only rivalled in size by the diamond-back rattlesnake and by the hamadryad; and its smaller but fiercer and more nervous brother, also belonging to the genus Lachesis, the jararaca, known in Martinique as the fer-de-lance. These ordinarily bring forth their young alive, but a big female bushmaster in Mr. Mole's possession had produced a number of eggs, and brooded them in ordinary snake fashion. The bushmaster is a

snake of rather sluggish temper, which dislikes to run, and it is formidable because of the immense quantities of poison which it spirts into its victim through the hollow fangs, which may be an inch and a half long. A Trinidad gentleman whom I met, a devoted hunter and lover of wilderness life, Mr. Arthur B. Carr, had dealt much with the species, and had once nearly lost his life from the bite of an individual. He said that this snake was active at night, and that in the daytime it slept, or at least lay still in such sluggish fashion that it was difficult to rouse. If in the daytime a man stepped on one, it would bite him unless he showed extraordinary agility. But if he brushed by it, it would only partially rouse itself; if his companion brushed by, it would become more alert but would probably not strike; but if several men were thus travelling in single file it would almost infallibly strike the third or fourth man. It would also strike repeatedly, not being one of those snakes whose poison is speedily exhausted; in one instance a single individual struck four hunters' dogs in quick succession, killing them. One which was put in a cage with a rattlesnake struck it, and the rattler died of the poison.

It feeds on possums, agoutis, and the like. It goes into burrows, or holes, and it was owing to this fact that Mr. Carr nearly lost his life. He had chased a paca into a hole, and digging after it for some feet he found the paca and killed it, and to his surprise found that the hole continued. He did not then know that when a paca is thus chased into a hole, and finds the end occupied either by a snake, a

peccary, or another paca, it will stay halfway down and permit itself to be killed rather than go to the end. He thrust his cutlass into the hole as far as his arm would reach, and touched something which yielded slightly. Again he tried, and moving the cutlass up and down found that the thing had scales-an old and big bushmaster has rough scales-and concluded that it was an armadillo. Again he thrust in, and this time the head of the aroused and angered bushmaster flicked out and struck his hand. He had received from Venezuelan Indians with whom he had hunted a decoction of plant-juice which they asserted to be sovereign against such snake-bites, and he always carried some with him; he now drank it and also slashed the wound, and although he was very sick he recovered. Recovery from the bite of the bushmaster is rare. He tried the remedy subsequently on snake-bitten animals, and saved several. It would certainly be interesting to make scientific experiments with this supposed remedy.

The jararaca is in places fairly plentiful in Trinidad, as it is in Demerara, and in both cases causes some not very important loss of life. In the Antilles proper it is found only in Martinique and St. Lucia, where it was formerly a veritable scourge. In both islands the mongoose was introduced to check it, and the experiment was completely successful, the snakes having now become so scarce that they are no longer a serious menace. In Martinique I visited a hospital, and happened to ask if they had many cases of snake-bite. One of the directors, a white-haired man, answered that they had very few indeed, because

the mongoose had almost exterminated the fer-de-lance; whereas in his district, when he was young, before the mongoose was introduced, no less than forty per cent of the total deaths were from snake-bite.

On all the other islands where the mongoose has been introduced, I was informed that it has become a veritable scourge, killing chickens, exterminating ground-birds, etc. In Trinidad it had not had much effect, although on the whole obnoxious; in Demerara I was told that it had had no perceptible effect at

all.

quantities, more deadly than that of the jararaca, but which have much less of it and relatively small fangs. In the daytime he found this snake very sluggish and reluctant to bite. After nightfall it is active, searching for the small snakes on which it feeds. If a man then treads on it, or too close to it, it will bite at once, and if it strikes

These facts, as regards both the poisonous snake and the carnivorous, snake-eating mammal, indicate how much disturbing effect in an island with a limited fauna, and how little disturbing effect on a larger land mass with a large and varied fauna, the introduction of the same new species may have. In Demerara and even in Trinidad, the jararaca had numerous rivals and enemies and never attained more than a limited importance; in the two islands it had neither rivals nor enemies and was a very abundant and most formidable pest. The mongoose on these two islands did its work well and almost exterminated the snake, a feat of capital importance; on the other Antillian islands it found no poisonous snakes and, being without rivals or enemies, became itself an intolerable pest; in Demerara and Trinidad it found itself in a large and varied fauna, it found both rivals and enemies, and it neither seriously diminished the poisonous snakes nor itself became a serious pest.

Carr related his experiences with the coral-snakes, whose poison is, in equal

bare skin the wound is dangerous and often fatal. It does not, when about to strike, coil, like the bushmaster, jararaca, and rattlesnake, but lies in a loose figure eight or S-shape. Carr had seen many interesting things in the

woods. His chief success was when motionless and unseen he studied the ways of beasts and birds -as field naturalists worthy of the name should do. Once he heard some red howler monkeys and crept up to watch them unperceived. An

old male sat high in a tree; half a dozen females were near him, and several young males were farther off, not venturing near. One of the females went toward the old male, mincing and showing off, pressing close to him; he uttered grunting sounds, not the loud roars of his dawn chant; but all the advances and caresses came from the female. She retired; two others took her place, showing off and stroking his cheeks; again he grunted, and received but did not return the caresses. For some minutes this went on; then the whole party came down to the ground to pick up some nuts.

I made an interesting trip with three friends-F. W. Urich, the entomologist, G. B. Rorer, the mycologist, and the solicitor-general, Archer Warner-into