ZOOLOGICAL SOCIETY BLT.LETIN. 



44S 



WHITE SOUTH AMERICAN RHEA IN THE ZOoLOGICAE PARK 



of the French occupation), hundreds of neat, 

 mosquito-screened houses and vistas of the gi- 

 gantic ditch. 



Savanilla presented the antithesis ; a collec- 

 tion of tumbled-down, dirty, thatched huts scat- 

 tered about in a desert. But there were com- 

 pensations — of a kind. If one purchased a 

 train ticket for 20 cents and paid with a five- 

 dollar American note, one's change would be a 

 large roll of yellow bills, aggregating ifiSO — in 

 Colombian money. A Colombian dollar at this 

 time exactly equalled an American cent ! It 

 was surprising to see ragged soldiers sitting in 

 the streets, gambling away bills of large denom- 

 inations. 



At La Guira one gives no thought to the town 

 itself, which is a typical Latin seaport, but is 

 lost in admiration of the wonderful mountains 

 which tower upward for thousands of feet al- 

 most sheer from the water. It is the grandest 

 part of the whole Spanish ^lain. 



Port-of-Spain, the capital of Trinidad, we 

 found a most wide-awake and American-like 

 city and the citizens hospitable and kind. We 

 were delayed there a week or two, but at last 

 were able to charter a twenty-one ton sloop and 



with a captain, cook, and crew of three, we 

 sailed westward under the ^'enezuelan flag, 

 headed for the northern part of the Orinoco 

 delta. 



From now on we were in the midst of primi- 

 tive nature and our results group themselves 

 naturallv under two heads: first, the aboreal and 

 aquatic life of the vast expanse of mangrove 

 swamps, and second, our studies of the peculiar 

 fauna and flora of La Brea, the pitch lake of 

 Venezuela, which represents the very beginning 

 of the high land adjoining the mangroves. Of 

 the pitch lake we had heard a good deal politi- 

 cally, and from a natural history point of view 

 we found it intensely interesting. Thes results 

 will be worked up as quickly as possible and 

 published by the Society. 



Some two hundred excellent negatives were 

 secured of flowers, insects, fish, birds and In- 

 dians. A collection of forty living birds and 

 two arboreal porcupines were brought back, all 

 arriving safely and in good health in New York. 

 All the species of birds are new to the collec- 

 tion. Besides these, several hundred specimens 

 of bird skins, embryos, eggs, fish and insects 

 were collected. 



