Those Who Help 185 



little creature; the richest golden brown above and pearly 

 white beneath, the line of demarcation between the two 

 colors being sharply drawn. It fell to the ground from a 

 tangle of vines pulled out of a tree to get a monkey which 

 had been shot and which had lodged among the branches. 

 Now this little mouse, which is evidently an arboreal 

 species, was dazed when it landed and we caught it easily 

 with our hands. We never saw anything like it again. It 

 was not only a new species, but a genus new to Central 

 America. Its nearest ally comes from Ecuador, and when 

 Dr. Allen and I described it we called it Oecomys trabeatus, 

 the adjective signifying in Latin "of regal dress." 



The lizard was really something to brag about. I named 

 him Diaphoranolis brooksi. Some of our Indians cut down 

 a tree of a species that looks a good deal like a poplar and 

 grows sparingly throughout the Darien region. It burns 

 green with a good hot fire, although there is nothing which 

 looks Hke rosin or pitch in it to explain its inflammabiHty. 

 This lizard, which fell out of the tree, was also an arboreal 

 form, related, but not very closely, to the "chameleon" of 

 our Southern states. In other words, naturalists would call 

 it an anoline lizard. It was pallid white, with many black 

 markings sharply defined. The pendulous dewlap, which 

 in this case was not extensible as it is so often, was not 

 decorated with flash markinfjs. The head and the neck and 

 the dewlap thus were all similarly marked with a network 

 of coarse black lines. There were two black saddles on the 

 back and nine black rings on the tail. The most interesting 

 feature of all was the fact that the limbs and the digits bore 

 many pairs of sharply defined black lines occurring as rings, 

 which, however, did not quite meet on the inner surface. 



