36 SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION 



of the broad plain. Along our trail appeared the familiar weeds of 

 temperate climates, left as evidence of the agriculture of the period 

 of French colonization. On the second day of this journey, when 

 we approached the precipitous escarpment of La Selle itself, our 

 pack animals were unable to progress with their loads of camp and 

 collecting equipment over the steep, rocky trails, and we engaged 

 cheerful Haitian women as porters, finally reaching the summit of 

 the ridge at 7,500 feet above the sea. At camp a thousand feet below 

 the summit near the head of the Riviere Chotard, forests of pine 

 extended on either hand, while the ground below was covered with 

 bracken or a turf in which white clover and strawberries blossomed. 

 The higher peaks and many ravines were covered with a rain-forest 

 jungle in which trees and shrubs grew densely, interlaced with the 

 entangling, wirelike strands of a creeping bamboo. Parrots, vocif- 

 erous crows, and pigeons were abundant in the pinelands, while in 

 the jungles were found solitaires, a beautiful chestnut-sided robin 

 not previously known to science, and many other birds. In early 

 morning, it was pleasant to rest in the warm sun on the edge of the 

 1,500-foot precijiice that marked the face of Alorne La Visite, one 

 of the higher points alcove camp, while through the still air from the 

 jungle depths came the clear, fiutelike notes of the musicicn, the 

 appropriate Haitian name of the solitaire, mingled with the barbaric 

 beat of distant work drums to whose irregular cadence laborers toiled 

 and sang in a remote world of cultivated fields far below. As no 

 zoological collector had visited this mountain ridge so far as known, 

 many specimens taken were new to science. Smoothly scaled lizards, 

 found under flat stones and preserved on the spot in a bottle of 

 native rum purchased from the load borne on the head of a traveling 

 merchant woman, proved to be a new genus, and landshells gathered 

 at random were also new. By means of a tall pine tree felled for a 

 ladder, we climbed down intO' a great sink hole and discovered in a 

 sheltered crevice bones of extinct mammals that ranged the island 

 before the coming of Columbus. 



Returning to the lowlands, I journeyed to Hinche in the level, 

 central plain where I was welcomed at the experiment station by Mr. 

 J. E. Boog-Scott, and pleasantly entertained while I explored for 

 strange birds. One journey was made as far as the caves at I'Atalaye, 

 where we viewed the excavations from which had come the remains 

 of a giant owl and numbers of other creatures that have become 

 extinct for no apparent reason and are known only from their skele- 

 tons in these deposits. 



