446 A YEAR OF COSTA RICAN NATURAL HISTORY 



saw in his hands, and so working the saw up and down the 

 plank was separated from the log. 



The water supply of Palmira, Filadelfia, Belen, Santa 

 Cruz and doubtless other towns of this country was largely, 

 but not entirely, drawn from town wells in the centers of 

 the plazas. In the first three towns named there was a wind- 

 mill over the well to draw up the water, but in Santa Cruz 

 buckets were let down on a rope and hauled up by hand. 

 There was at least some sediment, etc., in the Santa Cruz 

 water and the schoolhouse was not provided with one of the 

 stone filters to be found in the Liberia schoolhouse and in 

 many even rather poor houses of the central plateau of Costa 

 Rica. To these town wells came the women and children 

 from all directions to fill and carry off earthenware jars or 

 galvanized iron buckets of water. 



In one of the outhouses within the playground of the school 

 I caught, on January 24, a specimen of the large roach 

 Archimandrita marmorata. The body proper measures two 

 inches long and the widest part (of the abdomen) one inch, 

 but the shield on the upper surface of the prothorax is greatly 

 expanded forward and to right and left so as to conceal the 

 head completely when the insect is viewed from above. 

 The fore wings, each one of which is two and three-eighths 

 inches long and a little more than one inch wide, when folded 

 in the position of rest, mask the remainder of the body and 

 give it a total length of three inches and a width of one and 

 one-half. The prothoracic shield and these wings curve 

 downward along their outer edges so as to form a smooth 

 convex cover for the insect and, as it ran over smooth boards, 

 made picking it up a matter of some difficulty, and I would 

 not have succeeded without the aid of my net. The body 

 was marked with various shades of dark and light brown, the 

 darkest areas being a double-lobed spot half an inch wide on 

 the middle of the prothoracic shield, a streak of about the 



