96 A NATURALIST IN THE GUIANOS 



wheat or the recklessness to finance a Spanish-American 

 revolution. Besides, the alligator-skin industry does not 

 end with the night's exciting work in malarial swamps. 

 The skin has to be removed and salted, compared to 

 which the buying and selling of imaginary stocks of 

 pigs' feet before they are put in barrels is clean work. I 

 understand that these skins are worth in New York one 

 dollar apiece, including the cost of the salt. For twenty 

 of these skins, therefore, the alligator hunter can become 

 the possessor of a United States twenty-dollar piece, with 

 the motto ' In God we trust.' He will be able to add in 

 the vernacular of the citizens of the Great Bepublic, when 

 he comes to know them, ' Everyone else pays cash.' 



Captain Mayne Reid, in one of his delightful books 

 for boys, relates how a party of young hunters succeeded 

 in shooting geese at night which were so wild as to 

 be unapproachable during the day. The boys placed at 

 the head of their boat a frying-pan full of blazing pine- 

 knots, behind which a section of the thick bark of a tree 

 served as a reflector and also screened the occupants from 

 being seen. With this simple apparatus they paddled 

 down the stream after dark, and were thus able to get 

 quite close to and kill the wary birds they had vainly 

 attempted to approach in the daytime. The method 

 employed in killing alligators I have described is what has 

 brought to my mind one of Captain Mayne Reid's stories 

 which so fascinated me when I was a boy. There are 

 few points more curious in connection with the habits of 

 the various members of the animal kingdom than the 

 influence a bright light appears to exert at night on 

 almost every form of life. Let us take, for insta.nce, 

 creatures so widely different in every way as fishes and 

 insects. Everyone knows that the surest and easiest way 



