VALUE AND USES OF TIMBER. 39 



spirituous liquors or the drinking of sea water is considered beneficial 

 as an antidote. 



A small herb called the tibey, the flower of which resembles the 

 lobelia, grows in the meadows and pastures of the island. Its poison is 

 said to be so active that a horse or other animal eating of it dies in a 

 short time. The natural instinct of the animal teaches it to avoid this 

 dangerous plant as soon as the odor reaches him. 



The cowhage abounds upon the limestone soils of Porto Rico. This 

 is a tropical climbing plant, with beanlike pods, very much resemb- 

 ling huge brown caterpillars. They are covered by a multitude of fine 

 poisonous hairs, which, when disturbed, irritate the skin like the sting 

 of nettles. 



VALUE AND USES OF TIMBER. 

 CONSTRUCTION. 



Native woods are used in Porto Rico principally to make houses, 

 carts, furniture, fuel, cigar boxes, troughs, and wooden mortars. The 

 house construction is of two kinds — city buildings, which are made 

 usually of stone, and country houses of hardwood lumber and palm 

 thatch. In the city buildings the use of lumber is employed only 

 for joists or rafters, sills, balconies, and occasionally for floors. The 

 latter are usually of stone. In fact, the city houses are all built to 

 economize timber products, and from the most aucient to the most 

 recent all show that in their construction wood has been a much more 

 expensive material than stone. The principal timbers employed are 

 heavy beams, used for joists and rafters. These are usually hand 

 hewn from native hardwoods, but in Ponce, American and Canadian 

 pine is substituted in construction now going on. Country houses are 

 built both of masonry and of wood, but largely the latter, especially 

 in the remote districts. Nowhere did the writer see a single country 

 house in the process of construction, except in one instance, at San 

 Turce, a suburb of San Juan, and this was being built of imported 

 wood. Although wooden houses constructed of native wood abound 

 throughout the island, most of them bear marks of antiquity, many 

 being roofed with the old Spanish tile, which has not been used for the 

 past twenty years, since its general replacement by corrugated iron. 

 The number and character of these houses show that native lumber 

 has been comparatively abundant in times past. 



The country structures of the better class consist of large spacious 

 rooms, sufficiently elevated upon j>osts to allow what would be the lower 

 story in the United States to be used for a shed for horses, carts, sad- 

 dles, and other articles. These ground spaces are seldom if ever paved, 

 and rarely planked in, and then only by coarse weatherboards a foot or 

 more in width, without doors or windows. The upper story is alone 

 used for habitation. It is usually constructed of hardwood uprights 



