JUAN VINAS— AROUND THE LAGUNA 17 1 



them the trees were too old to send out more branches. The 

 cabin stood in a little garden enclosed b^ barbed wire. On 

 one side was a patch of plantains mingled with palms, cane 

 and a number of Maranta-like plants. On the other were 

 a few huts made entirely of scraps of corrugated iron, where 

 some peon families lived. In the space between these 

 houses and the railroad was a perfect thicket of the hand- 

 some small milkweed with brilliant red-and-orange blos- 

 soms {Asclepias curassavica) so common in Costa Rica. 



Our first stay at Juan Vinas in the latter days of June 

 found the ground about our cabin dug up ready for beans to 

 be planted. At the end of July the beans were one to two 

 feet high. By the last of September, the crop was mature, 

 the vines dried up and a negro was at work clearing the 

 ground for a new crop to go in in a week or two, for already 

 there was an amazing growth of weeds and bushes. Gui- 

 tites that had been cut to the ground in June and again in 

 July now showed stalks as high as one's head and an inch 

 thick, and the guitite fence posts, — really bare posts at our 

 August visit — were bushes almost as high as the cabin. 



On the evenings of September 30 and October i we no- 

 ticed some luminous insects creeping over the soil imme- 

 diately in front of our cabin, where the beans had been 

 cleared away. We obtained a few specimens each night 

 and kept them alive in a vial for two days or so before pre- 

 serving them. They were beetle larvae of the Elater fam- 

 ily — that of the common spring- or click-beetle of the United 

 States. In daylight these larvae were pale yellow in color 

 and presented no remarkable difference from other larvae 

 of this family, but at night they were very attractive from 

 the glow which they produced. Their lengths ranged from 

 4 to 22 mm. when resting quietly, but they could stretch out 

 to a little more than these dimensions. Their light-pro- 

 ducing organs were arranged in eleven pairs as follows: i. 



