22 A YEAR OF COSTA RICAN NATURAL HISTORY 



Beyond Las Lapas we wound about the deep side valley 

 of Rio Concepcion, a northern tributary of the Rio Grande 

 de Tarcoles. The track twists and turns in a most extraor- 

 dinary fashion so that there were many places where one 

 could look across and see another section of it running paral- 

 lel to that on which the train stood, and every turn opened 

 a new and beautiful vista. West of Turrucares the grade is 

 very steep; going in that direction the main thing is to hold 

 the train from running too fast down hill, but traveling 

 east is another story. On the return trip in the same month 

 of October, the train pulled out of Orotina at nine o'clock — 

 "a la punta" plus some minutes. The distance from Oro- 

 tina to San Jose is 46 miles, the difference in elevation about 

 3000 feet and our running time was twelve hours. The 

 day was bright and beautiful until almost four in the after- 

 noon and we had little rain at any time. The scenery was 

 magnificent and the ride should have been a pleasure, but 

 fatigue made it tiresome before we reached San Jose. In 

 addition to the dangerous condition of the roadbed there 

 was no coal, whereby the locomotive was forced to burn 

 wood instead. The consequence was that it could run only 

 a few miles before the steam was exhausted and it was nec- 

 essary to stand still and wait until the pressure rose high 

 enough. 



These delays could sometimes be utilized. At Rio Con- 

 cepcion we stopped fully half an hour. A stream of clear 

 water flowed alongside the track from a brook serving as a 

 water supply. There were six or seven species of dragon- 

 flies flying over this water so P. rigged up the net and caught 

 specimens of all but the two most common ones. No one 

 had ever collected these insects here before — and it gave 

 some passengers something to look at while they waited. 



In such wise we made the trip, running fifteen or twenty 

 minutes, then standing three-quarters of an hour to get up 



