THE BANANA RIVER COUNTRY 321 



specimens these urns are one-thirty-second of an inch high. 

 In not a single plant of this species did I find any ants, but it 

 looked so much like the bull's horn thorn as to suggest that 

 it might be the starting point for the development of the 

 latter. 



In Bananito Farm as in other banana plantations, there 

 were rubber trees scattered here and there, left from the 

 original forest when the ground was cleared. The trunk 

 of every such tree was scarred with cuts made through the 

 bark to secure the rubber. In some of these little scars bits 

 of the rubber could be seen, of a black color and quite elastic. 

 Mr. Veitch told me that the rubber trees in his division had 

 just recently been bled, that the sap is taken once a year, to 

 the extent of about fifteen hundred pounds. It is white 

 when it runs out of the tree, for which reason it is called 

 *'milk of rubber," but blackens on exposure to the air. In 

 cutting through the bark to bleed the tree it is important 

 not to girdle the tree completely, as such treatment kills it. 

 The proper cuts, according to Mr. Veitch, are two half- 

 circles inclined obliquely downward toward each other, but 

 one cut about four inches below the other. If cut in this 

 way, a tree recovers from the wounds during the year be- 

 tween cuts. 



Near the end of the track was an immense tree (not a 

 rubber tree, however) whose buttress-like roots ran as wooden 

 ridges twenty feet from the trunk and reached a height of 

 four feet, decreasing to a few inches as the distance from the 

 trunk increased. Thence I went down the left bank of the 

 Bananito until the bananas gave way to a dense growth of 

 wild cane. Retracing my steps I crossed to the right bank 

 by a fallen tree which served as footbridge, crossed a re- 

 cently-burned patch of cane where the sun beat fiercely, to 

 some thinned-out forest, but finding nothing returned to my 

 trolley and so back to Philadelphia South. 



