LOWER NEIGHBORS OF CART AGO l6l 



or two passengers was formed by a box hung from a pulley 

 sliding on iron cables. The box ran to the lowest part of 

 the cable by gravity and the passengers pulled themselves 

 the rest of the way by a rope working over pulleys on shore. 

 The bridge was rebuilt more strongly and with a longer 

 span in 1911. 



There are three well-marked river terraces at this part of 

 the Reventazon. In the potreros of the upper terraces we 

 saw many trees, mostly poro, which had been felled to kill 

 the mistletoe — matapalo — with which they were Infested. 

 This was not to save the poros remaining but because the 

 birds eat the mistletoe berries greedily and so distribute 

 the seeds to the coffee trees, to which the parasitic mistletoe 

 does great damage. The lowest terrace is a fringe of beau- 

 tiful flat meadows not much above the usual river level, 

 which extend half a mile or more along the right bank. 

 They contained numbers of line large old trees, which were 

 amazingly rich in epiphytes. Some of these we had not 

 seen before, such as Phyllocacti, a small bromeliad with 

 beautiful pink flowers but wickedly barbed and spiny 

 leaves, new begonias, mistletoes and an amarantaceous 

 plant {Telanthera mexicana), which although not truly a 

 vine grew among other stronger plants and dangled its long, 

 weak, slender stems with their little heads of whitish flowers 

 high above the ground. Although we examined a number 

 of bromeliads for dragonfly larvae we found none here. Mr. 

 Lankester told us the trees on this terrace were mostly 

 legumes of various species, but they were thickly overgrown 

 with many kinds of figs {Ficus sp.) which have the "con- 

 strictor" habit. The seeds of such plants germinate some- 

 where on the host tree and their roots and branches grow 

 about the host so closely that the latter is strangled and ul- 

 timately dies. In time the original tree-trunk rots away 

 and the fig, a marvelous tangle of thick roots and stems. 



