CHAPTER II. 



Commence Journey up San Juan River Palms and "Wild Canes 

 Plantations The Colorado Elver Proposed Improvement of the 

 River Progress of the Delta Mosquitoes Disagreeable Night 

 Fine Morning Vegetation of the Banks Seripiqui river 

 Mot-mots Foraging Ants Their method of Hunting Ant 

 Thrushes They attack the Nests of other Ants Birds' Nests, 

 how preserved from them Reasoning powers in Ants Parallel 

 between the Mammalia and the Hymenoptera Utopia. 



I FOUND at Greytown the mail-boat of the Cliontales 

 Gold Mining Company, which came down monthly in 

 charge of Captain Anderson, an Englishman who had 

 knocked about all over the world. The crew consisted 

 of four Mosquito negroes, who are celebrated on this 

 coast for their skill as boatmen. Besides the crew, we 

 were taking three other negroes up to the mines, and 

 with my boxes we were rather uncomfortably crowded 

 for a long journey. The canoe itself was made from the 

 trunk of a cedar-tree (Cedrela odorata). It had been 

 hollowed out of a single log, and the sides afterwards 

 built up higher with planking. This makes a very 

 strong boat, the strength and thickness being where it 

 is most required, at -the bottom, to withstand the 

 thumping about amongst the rocks of the rapids. I 

 was once in one, coming down a dangerous rapid on the 

 river Gurupy, in Northern Brazil, when we were driven 

 with the full force of the boiling stream broadside upon 



