GUANACASTE—SANTA CRUZ 449 



water anywhere near. This Gomphoides is two and one- 

 quarter to two and one-half inches long. The general 

 colors of the body are dark brown and pale green; the latter, 

 mixed with pale brown, occupies much of the lateral sur- 

 faces of the abdomen, leaving only a narrow mid-dorsal 

 band or stripe of brown. The eyes do not nearly meet on 

 the top of the head. At the hind end of the abdomen is a 

 single pair of appendages, about three thirty-seconds of an 

 inch long and curved as forceps in the male, but straight 

 and one-sixteenth inch long in the female. The colorless 

 wings spread three to three and one-quarter inches. Or- 

 themis levis, a smaller species two inches long, wing-spread 

 three inches, has the eyes meeting on the top of the head and 

 immediately in front of the eyes of the male is a patch of 

 brilliant metallic purple, only a trace of which exists in the 

 female. There are two wide pale green or yellow bands on 

 each side of the brown thorax, as well as pale lines, and the 

 slender abdomen is red or reddish-brown. 



This brook bed lay within a dry woods of rather small 

 trees. One tree by the bank was a "cedro pochote" (Pa- 

 chira fendleri^), remarkable for the short thick spines on the 

 trunk. I measured one of the largest spines finding it to 

 have a diameter of one and four-fifths inches and an equal 

 height. Normally these spines are solid and hard and I 

 was unable to cut one off" with my knife; some of them, how- 

 ever, were burrowed into by insects. 



At another place on this bank was a swarm of Phalangids 

 {Liobunum biolleyi) or "daddy longlegs," here called "in- 

 dios"; they were hanging together by hundreds in a dense 

 mass, their long legs waving like a bunch of horsehair. I 

 gathered some of them, the others separating and moving 

 off in all directions. A couple of hours later when I repassed 

 the place, they had again massed themselves. Professor 



1 The cedro pochote may be the Bombax nicoyense of Pittier, 1914. 



