ZOOLOGICAL SOCIETY BULLETIN 



1311 



trail and my tree^ a sorrowful leave taking as is 

 always my misfortune. For the bonds which 

 bind me to a place or a person are not easily 

 broken. 



In this casC; however, the bond was not al- 

 together severed, and a week later when the 

 sky line was unbroken by land, when a long 

 ground swell waved, but did not break the deep 

 blue of the open sea, I unlaced my bag of j ungle 

 mold. Armed with forceps, lens and vials I 

 began mj^ search. For days I had gazed up- 

 ward; now my scrutiny was directed downward. 

 With binoculars I had scanned without ceasing 

 the myriad leaves of a great tree. Now with 

 lens or naked eye I sought for signs of life on 

 an infinitely smaller scale; the metropolis of a 

 fallen leaf, the inhabitants of a dead twig. When 

 I studied the tree-top life in the lofty jungle 

 I was in a land of Brobdingnag; now I was ver- 

 ily a Gulliver in Lilliput. The cosmos in my 

 war-bag teemed with mystery as deep and as 

 inviting as any in the jungle itself. 



When I began work I knew little of what 

 I should find. My vague thoughts visualized 

 ants and worms, and especially I anticipated 

 unearthing myriads of the unpleasant macuins, 

 or bete rouge, whose hosts had done all in their 

 power to make life in the jungle unhappy. 



For ten days or more on the steamer trip 

 north Mr. Hartley and I labored over the jungle 

 debris. After two hours o£ steady concentration 

 our eyes rebelled and we had to desist. It 

 seemed at times as if the four square feet had 

 increased to forty, but the last handful was 

 finally sifted and teased to shreds. Our method 

 of work was to place a small pile on a news- 

 paper spread on a table under the skylights 

 of the smoking room, and with forceps and dis- 

 secting needle to search carefully every surface 

 of leaf and frond and to split evei*y twig and 

 stem. 



It was found that the safest way to capture 

 the minute creatures which crawled or hopped 

 about, was to wet a small brush in alcohol, touch 

 them with the tip and float them off in the liquid 

 in a very small vial. Thus they were uninjured 

 and we could pick them from a mass of earth 

 or fungus without including any of the debris 

 itself. Usually we worked with our naked eyes, 

 but occasionally hunted over a particularly rich 

 field with low-power dissecting lenses. 



Day by day our vials increased. Scores of 

 creatures evaded our search. Many others, of 

 which I had captured a generous number, I al- 

 lowed to escape. My lilliputian census was far' 

 from the mere aggregation of ants and worms 

 which I had anticipated, and a review of the 



whole showed that hardly any great group of 

 living creatures was unrepresented. 



Two objects indicated the presence of wild 

 mammals. First a bunch of rufous hairs which 

 in size, color and minute structure were identical 

 with those of the common agouti, which was 

 very common at Utinga. I also found sign of 

 this rodent. Man, himself, was represented by 

 two wads which had dropped from my gun- 

 shots sometime during the week. One had al- 

 ready began to disintegrate — wet, half decayed 

 and inhabited by half a dozen tiny organisms. 



Five feathers were the marks of birds, also 

 doubtless the result of my study during the 

 week. A body feather and two primaries from 

 a sparrow-like bird were indeterminate, but two 

 brilliant, green plumes came without question 

 from the body of a calliste. Of reptiles there 

 was a broken skull of some lizard, half disinte- 

 grated, with a few of the teeth still left. There 

 was, besides, the small egg-shell of a lizard 

 which had hatched and gone forth to live its 

 life elsewhere in the jungle. A third rej)tilian 

 trace may have been his nemesis — a good-sized 

 shred of snake-skin. The group of amphibians 

 was present even in this small area of four 

 square feet — a very tiny, dried, black and whol- 

 ly unrecognizable little frog. Fishes were ab- 

 sent, although from my knees as I scraped up 

 the debris, I could almost see a little igarape 

 in which dwelt scores of minnows. 



As 1 delved deeper and examined the mold 

 more carefully for the diminutive inhabitants, 

 I found that this thin veneer from the floor of 

 the jungle, appeared to have several layers, each 

 with its particular fauna. The ujDper layer 

 was composed of recently fallen leaves, nuts, 

 seeds and twigs, dry and quite fresh. As yet 

 these showed but little change, and only the 

 damage wrought by insects and other agencies 

 while they were still on the trees. In this laj^er 

 were small colonies of ants in hollow twigs and 

 occasional huge solitary ones. Here lived in 

 hiding small moths, beetles and bugs awaiting 

 dusk to fly forth through the jungle. The low- 

 est layer was one chiefly of matted, thready 

 roots holding together compact masses of earthy 

 soil, mixed with a large proportion of tiny bits 

 of quartz. The animal life of this stratum was 

 very meagre, occasional mites — especially red 

 ones — and a few earth and round worms. The 

 latter were in much fewer numbers than in the 

 middle laj^ers. 



Between the upper and the middle layers 

 were sprouting nuts and seeds, with their 

 blanched roots threaded downward into the rich 

 dark mold, and the greening cotyledons curling 



