266 A YEAR OF COSTA RICAN NATURAL HISTORY 



huge cables as thick as a man's body and composed of sev- 

 eral smaller lianas, each as thick as one's wrist, wound 

 round each other. 



The trail broadened to ten feet or more in width, was much 

 cut up by horses' hoofs and in many places extremely soft 

 and muddy. It crossed several small streams which were 

 not affluents of the Chiriqui but flowed in the opposite di- 

 rection. Finally I reached a clearing with much grass and 

 a few trees, beyond which was a grove of large trees with no 

 undergrowth or grass, the ground being rough and muddy. 

 Crossing this clearing I caught a Megaloprepus dragonfly, 

 much to my surprise — the locality was indeed far from 

 water but certainly not "deep woods." The buttress-roots 

 of some of the trees in this grove enlarged the diameters of 

 their trunks at the ground to twenty or thirty feet. The 

 altitude of the little hill on which this grove was situated was 

 1400 feet by my aneroid. From here I returned to Peralta 

 as I had come. 



In the morning of March 25, 1910, I went to the Rio 

 Chiriqui again, but instead of going into the woods border- 

 ing it on the north, as I did before, I went along the river 

 bank itself, which is formed of boulders of various sizes. 

 The river had several channels and in the southernmost of 

 these, where the current was less swift, were not a few small 

 dragonflies with brilliant coppery heads and thoraces and 

 bright sky-blue abdomens {Argia near cupraurea). When 

 I had gone upstream several hundred yards from the rail- 

 road two deer crossed the river about fifty feet away from 

 me. I saw them before they discovered me but one soon 

 turned and spied me; they quickened their pace but did not 

 run and soon disappeared into the shrubbery, which on both 

 banks intervened between water and forest. These deer 

 stood not more than four feet high and had no horns. Ac- 

 cording to Elliott, there are four species of deer which prob- 



