140 A YEAR OF COSTA RICAN NATURAL HISTORY 



campylus regelii was still flowering freely. There were num- 

 bers of a pretty plant with glossy dark green leaves and 

 violet-blue flowers an inch and a half long {Cestrum ira- 

 zuense). Here and there, a small delicate composite with 

 pretty feathery leaves, Bidens irazue?isis, lifted its single 

 terminal flower head, resembling a yellow (and yellow- 

 centered) daisy. Beginning above the forest and continuing 

 to several hundred feet below it, were draperies of Bomarea, 

 a. vine (one of the Amaryllidaceae) with pendent clusters of 

 beautiful dark red flowers. A few weeks earlier we saw these 

 vines in the forest near the Orosi falls, where the flowers had 

 the inner sides of petals and sepals richly blotched with black, 

 while those we examined on Irazii showed only clear red. 

 In clearings in the lower part of the forest and on roadsides 

 below it were clumps of a truly magnificent composite, 

 Senecio multivenius, which reminded us of our own golden- 

 rods. It grows eight or ten feet high, and bears a golden- 

 yellow mass of flowers more than a foot across — the indi- 

 vidual heads are small but the aggregate is immense — which 

 have a sweet and delicate perfume. 



When we were some miles below the forest the rain ceased, 

 the mists gradually lifted and the roads from this level down 

 to Cartago were much drier. Above Tierra Blanca, as we 

 were jogging along a piece of road with high banks of clay, 

 washed by rains and cut by road menders into irregular 

 pockets and gullies, our guide, who had been watching the 

 banks carefully, suddenly pulled up, put his horse half up the 

 bank and began to dig in the friable soil with his fingers. 

 In a minute or two he loosened a curious little object of red 

 pottery — a flattened ball about two inches in diameter with 

 a ring-like handle on one side. The ball is hollow, con- 

 taining some small hard objects which rattle when it is 

 shaken, and on the flatter side opposite the handle is a 

 number of irregular little holes such as might have been 



