230 
EXPLORING FOR CASTILLO A RUBBER 
Castilloa growing everywhere, and many a stiff climb Lucas gave us 
before the choice growths were reached. Afterward he explained that 
he took us only to the easy places, as from some where he went alone, 
we would never have returned alive. Even up here I found stumps of 
huge Castilloas that had been cut down to get all of the milk. The 
largest trees then standing did not measure more than from sixteen 
to eighteen inches in diameter, but there were many of them, and 
thousands of a lesser size. 
Pressed later for a definite statement as to what he gathered daily 
when rubber hunting, Lucas said that two years before six of them 
had, in this region, in seven days, gathered four hundred pounds of 
dry rubber. As they never work Sundays, that would mean six days’ 
CATTLE RANCH AT THE LLANOS. 
[Don Ramon in the Foreground.] 
work, that is, unless they loafed three of them, which is probable. For 
an experiment, we sent out four men late one morning, who were back 
by midday with fifteen and one-quarter pounds of milk that after coag- 
ulation and drying made about eight pounds of rubber. As they nor- 
mally get fifty cents a day, silver, equal to twenty-five cents, gold, that 
was not a bad return. 
It is due to the man who first told how bees collected rubber latex 
as well as the rubber itself, from the cuts in the trees, that he receive 
apologies of all skeptics, for the story is true. I saw hundreds in all 
parts of the peninsula, and they not only love rubber, but almost every- 
thing else, and are a great nuisance in camp. What they do with the 
