IN PANAMA 223 



variety of sources, and in some cases from scientific men. So it was 

 interesting- to run across the same mental processes and the same sort 

 of deduction among the natives of the rubber countries. The illustration 

 (page 221 ) shows an instrument designed and made by the native referred 

 to, a man named Juancho, who is shown in another illustration standing 

 in a grove of Castilloa. The instrument consists of a cylinder of light 

 balsa wood, wound with codline, through which runs a piston made 

 of hard wood, one end tipped with a short iron chisel. The chisel end of 

 the cylinder is fitted with a strip of pure rubber, a packing to be drawn 

 tightly around the tree. The puncture made and the piston withdrawn, 

 the hope was that the cylinder would fill with latex. That expectation, 

 however, was blasted, as only the usual amount of latex followed the cut. 



RUBBER CUTTERS AT RIO NEGRO CAMP. 



Two of the long trips across country brought us out at the llanos, 

 or grass plains prairies containing some 25,000 acres, on which grazed 

 some one hundred and fifty head of cattle of the old Spanish strain, but 

 big and fat for all of that. They were not at all wild, yet to milk a 

 cow it was necessary to muzzle her calf and tie it to her front legs, and 

 then she seemed to feel that her offspring was getting the leche that 

 really flowed into a calabash. In a little oasis of trees in this prairie 

 of rich, short grass, was a neat native house in which lived the keeper 

 of the herd and his wife. Thin, almost to emaciation, was Don Ramon, 

 gray haired, with the sparse beard of the true Indian, clad in white; 



