NICARAGUA.*

AN alligator's head, emerging from the ripples of the San Juan, on the cover, and a jaguar, in a tropical forest, at close-quarters with a man, for a frontispiece, are promising indications, fully borne out by Mr. Belt's book. It is a delightful combination of adventure with scientific observation, and anybody who is de- pressed by the classified and italicised arrangement of certain por- tions of it, may cheer up. It is no more dull or dry than Mr. Bates's Amazons, or Mr. Wallace's Malaccas, but full of interest from beginning to end, written with the vivacity of a keen and close observer, to whom every object, from the mountains to the molehills, has its special and proportionate interest. From San Juan del Norte, the Atlantic port of Nicaragua in Central America—the scene of many of Mr. Boyle's best sketches—Mr. Belt made the river voyage in the " mail-boat " of the gold-mining company to San Ubaldo, crossing the great lake of Nicaragua, where the islets are bright with beautiful birds ; and all along his subsequent slow forest route he studied everything. The princi- pal scientific aim of his work is the tracing of "evolution," and he deals largely with mimetic forms, of which he furnishes several most curious instances discovered in his forest explorations among the insect tribes ; but he is so sympathetic, so genuine a lover as well as student of nature, with a taste for pictures as well as an ardour for facts, that he glorifies the ever verdant Atlantic forest, with its ceaseless round of active life, its perennial moisture, • The Naturalist in Nicaragua: a Narrative of a Residence at the Gad Mines of Chontales, Journeys in the Savannahs and Forests. By Thomas Belt, F.G.B. London: John Murray.

and its undying summer ; and turns the swarming life under the great straight trunks which rise a hundred feet without a branch, and carry their domes of foliage directly up to where the balmy breezes blow, and the sun's rays quicken, into a series of dramas. What a walk that must have been, through the great forest, past Pital, where the traveller tells us :-

" Sometimes the ground is carpeted with largo flowers, yellow, pink, or white, that have fallen from some invisible tree-top above, or the air is filled with a delicious perfume, the source of which one seeks around for in vain, for the flowers that cause it arc far overhead out of sight, lost in the great overshadowing crown of verdure. Numerous brooks intersect the forest, with moss-covered stones and fern-Clad nooks. One's thoughts are led away to the green dells in English denes, but are soon recalled, for the sparkling pools are the favourite haunts of the fairy humming-birds ; like an arrow one will dart up the brook, and poised on wings, with almost invisible velocity, clothed in purple, golden, or emerald glory, hang suspended in the air. It gazes with startled look at the intruder, then, with a sudden jerk, turning round first one eye, then the other, it disappears like a flash of light."

During four years Mr. Belt resided in the gold-mining village of Santo Domingo, in the province of Chontales, Nicaragua, nearly midway between the Atlantic and the Pacific. Ibis in the midst of the great forest that covers most of the Atlantic slope of Central America, continues unbroken eastward to the Atlantic, but opens, a few miles to the westward, into the highly- timbered plains and gassy savannahs stretching to the Lake of Nicaragua. The gold-mining community, people of mixed descent, Indian and Spanish, with a slight admixture of negro blood, are not interesting, and the author dismisses them briefly,. to go on to the natural features and products, and the ever- attractive animal kingdom, as represented there. Immediately on. his arrival he set to work to clear and cultivate the land about the roomy, comfortable house allotted to him, which commanded a view of the machinery, workshops, and part of the mines.on the other side of the valley, and in the course of his experiments in vegetable-growing he made some intending observations ; one in particular, confirmatory of Darwin's statement that the scarlet- runner is dependent for its fertilisation upon the operations of the humble-bee. Mr. Belt's scarlet-runners grew well and flowered abundantly, bat never produced a single pod. He says :—

"There are many humble-bees, of different species from ours, in. tropical America, but none of them frequented the flowers of the scarlet- runner, and to that circumstance we may safely attribute its sterility. When those interested in the acclimature of the natural productions of one country on the soil of some distant one, study the mutual reactions of plants and animals, they will find that in the case of many plants it is important that the insects specially adapted for the fertilisation of their flowers should be introduced with them. Thus, if the insect that assists in the fertilisation of the vanilla could be introduced into India, the growers of that plant would be relieved of much trouble, and it might be thoroughly naturalised."

He had great trouble with many kinds of insects, but the leaf- cutting ants were his most dangerous, remorseless, and invincible enemies. During his continual warfare with them he gained some very curious infermation respecting their habits and those of other tribes of these- fascinating insects. One almost resenta the smallness of the ant race, they are so wonderfully interesting,.

if one could but see them distinctly. Ant stories are always irresistible ; they rank next to elephant, and before lion and tiger stories, and Mr. Belt's collection is one of the best within our knowledge. It is difficult to select one passage more interesting than another from his chapter on Ecitons and Alcodoma, and our space limits us to one. After an extraordinary account of the strategical warfare parried on between him and the leaf-cutters, with frequent discomfiture to himself, and a curious theory that the use they make of the leaves (which is an unsettled point) is as manure for growing a certain fungus on which they feed, he gives the following instance of their reasoning powers :—

"A nest was made near one of our tramways, and to got to the trees- the ants had to cross the rails, over which the waggons were continually passing and repassing. Every time they came along a number of ants were crushed to death. They persevered in crossing for some time, but at last set to work, and tunnelled underneath each rail. One day,. when the waggons were not running, I stopped up the tunnels with stones, but though great numbers carrying leaves were thus cut off from the nest, they would not cross the rails, but set to work making fresh tunnels underneath them. Apparently, an order had gone forth,. or a general understanding been come to, that the rails were not to be crossed."

The devastation wrought by these little creatures is so enormous, that one asks,—What forests can stand before them ? How is it that vegetation is not eaten off the face of the earth ? And Mr.

Belt declares it must be annihilated anywhere but in the tropics, where the recuperative powers of nature are immense and ever active. Then the leaf-cutting ants are confined to tropical America, and there are certain kinds of leaves they do not like. "The reason why the lime is not subject to the attacks of the

ants," says Mr. Belt, "is unknown, and the fact that it is so, is another instance of how little we know why one species of a par- ticular genus should prevail over another nearly similar form. A little more or leas acridity, or a slight chemical difference in the composition of the tissues of a leaf, so small that it is inappre- ciable to our senses, may be sufficient to ensure the preservation or the destruction of a species throughout an entire continent."

The mining operations and the geology of the district furnish

some interesting chapters, but the author's excursions are the gems of the book. He never can have felt lonely, with his quick sensitiveness to the sights and the sounds of nature, and his imme- diate investigation of the ..manners and customs of every new ac-

quaintance among flying and creeping things and the forest wonders we call "still" plants and the trees, the beautiful tropical birds, the butterflies, the spiders and the wasps, the beetles and the ants. In one delightful !Tot, where a beautifully clear and sparkling brook came down to join the river, soiled with the mining debris, multitudes of birds would gather in the evening to drink at the pellucid stream, or catch the insects playing above the water ; add Mr. Belt's description of the gorgeous humming-birds is like the tumbling out of the contents of a sultana's jewel-box. There is a forest among whose larger trees grows the "cortege," whose wood is as hard as ebony, and which is, in March, entirely covered with brilliant yellow flowers, unrelieved by a green leaf ; its great yellow domes may be distinguished among the dark green forest at six miles' distance. Close by they are quite dazzling in the sunshine, and when they shed their flowers the ground is carpeted with yellow. Bands of large yellowish-brown spider-monkeys live in the forests, and it is said a black-and- white eagle preys upon them ; but Mr. Belt never saw an eagle, though he constantly fell in with the monkeys. He tells a curious

anecdote on this subject:— "Don Francisco Velasquez, one of our officer; told me that one day he heard a monkey crying out in the forest for more than two hours, and at last, going to see what was the matter, he saw a monkey on a branch, and an eagle beside it, trying to frighten it to turn its back, when it would have seized it. The monkey, however, kept its face to its foe, and' the eagle did not care to engage with it in this position, but probably would have tired it out. Velasquez fired at the eagle and frightened it away."

What misery the valiant little animal must have suffered during the two hours of its crying for the long-delayed help! A white- faced minus monkey, named "Mickey," is one of the pleasantest creatures we ever met in a book. There is a great deal about him, but we can merely offer the following selection of his actions, which Mr. Belt describes as "very human-like :"-

"When anyone came near to fondle him, he never neglected the opportunity of pocket-picking. Anything eatable disappeared into his mouth immediately. Once ho abstracted a small bottle of turpentine from the pocket of our medical officer. He drew the cork, held it first to one nostril, then the other, made a wry face, renorked it, and returned it to the doctor. One day, when he got loose, he was detected carrying off the cream-jug from the table, holding it upright with both hands, and trying to move off on his bind limbs. He gave the jug up without spilling a drop, all the time making an apologetic grunting chuckle he often used when found out in any mischief, and which always meant,

know I have dons wrong, but don't punish me ; in fact, I did not mean to do it,—it was accidental: "

Mr. Belt attentively watched the migrations of butterflies which occurred every year, and always in the same direction, but he is unable to arrive at any satisfactory explanation of them.

The flights were in vast clouds, all passing to the south-east, and there were nia return swarms. Some of the most interesting among the author's excursions were made along the river Juigalpa, where he found numerous varieties of birds and insects and vegetable life; and in particular, saw the beautiful " toledo," so called because its note resembles these syllables. The toledo is rarely seen, for it frequents the deepest shades. It is about the size of a liunet, velvety-black, with a scarlet crest, two ribbon-like feathers waving from its tail, and a sky-blue shawl over its back. All along the course of the river, and near

the Salto waterfall, are curious Indian remains, shattered statues of strange workmanship, and the graves of chiefs. Of the

towns in the interior, whose sites are all beautiful, the author gives the same melancholy description ; they are lavishly endowed by nature, and the people are sunk in poverty, idleness, and ignorance. Sadder still is his picture of the Upland Indians, who exist from generation to generation on the bleak and barren bill ranges, though, as the greater part of the land in the central provinces of Nicaragua is unappropriated, they might make their homesteads where, with one-half the labour they expend, they might live in abundance. The house on the hill range beyond Jiontega, in which the travellers rested, had been occupied for two generations, but no one had brought in even a log of wood for a seat, and a table would be beyond their wildest dreams of comfort. "An avocado tree grew before their door," says Mr. Belt, "the only forest tree to be seen, and it was deeply cut into. I asked why they had injured it, and they said they fired at it as

a target, and, lead being scarce, they dug out the bullets with their knives ; yet within thirty paces of their hat there were plenty of pine trees that would have done equally well as a target,

but then they would have had to walk a few yards from their door." The interest of Mr. Belt's narrative of his excursions increases as he climbs the hills, in whose majestic forests the guess], or royal bird of the Aztecs, is sometimes found; on whose wild savannahs the travellers lost their way, and found hospitality among strange, vegetating people. In the course of this journey, Mr. Belt found conclusive evidence that the glacial drift extended to the tropics, which he makes the occasion of an interesting digression into the glacial period generally. A discussion of the whereabouts of Atlantis follows his exposi- tion of the refuge of the tropical American animals and plants during the glacial period. "Was the fabled Atlantis," he asks, "really a myth, or was it not that great continent in the Atlantic laid bare by the lowering of the ocean, on which the present West Indian Islands were mountains, rising high above' the level and fertile plains which are now covered by the sea?" We could not do justice to the arguments by which Mr. Belt sup- ports his theory, and can only direct his readers to them as remarkable points in his work.

Mr. Belt's narrative of his ascent of the high ranges is interesting, both from the breadth of the view which it spreads before us, and from the minute detail of his observations as a naturalist. He especially notices the prevalence of the bull's- born thorn in this region, and gives a drawing of this plant (which exactly justifies its name), with the following curious instances of bird instinct :—

" Many birds hang their nests from the extremities of the branches, and a safer place could hardly be chosen, as, with the sharp thorns, and the stinging-ants that inhabit them, no mammal would, I think, dare to attempt the ascent of the tree. Stinging-ants are not the only insects whose protection birds secure by building near their nests. A small parrot builds constantly on the plains in a hole made in the neat of the termites, and a species of fly- catcher makes its nest alongside of that of one of the wasps. On the savannahs, between Acoyapo and Nancitat, there is a shrub, with sharp curved prickles, called Iriena pasara (Come here) by the Spaniards, because it is difficult to extricate oneself from its hold when the dress is caught : as one part is cleared, another will be entangled. A yellow and brown fly-catcher bands its nest in these bushes, and generally places it alongside that of a banded wasp, so that with the prickles and the wasps it is well guarded. I witnessed, however, the death of one of the birds from the very means it had chosen for the pro- tection of its young. Darting hurriedly out of its domed nest as we were passing, it was caught just under its bill by one of the curved, hook-like thorns, and in trying to extricate itself got further entangled. Its fluttering disturbed the wasps, who flew down upon it, and in less than a minute stung it to death."

The sketches of social and political life into which Mr. Belt occa- sionally digresses are very clever, his description of the revolu-

tions in Nicaragua especially so. In conclusion, he says : —" Of patriotism I never saw a symptom in Central America, nothing

but selfish partisanship, willing at any moment to set the country in a blaze of war, if there was only a prospect of a little spoil from the flames."

We learn from his preface that the author has been travelling to the Urals, and beyond them, to the country of the nomad Kirghizes, and the far Altai Mountains, on the borders of Thibet, and is probably at this moment speeding across the frozen Siberian steppes, wrapped in firs, listening to the sleigh bells, and wonder- ing how his book—some of whose theories were thought out on the plains of Southern Australia—has sped. He will find an en- couraging reply on his return home, and we hope he will give us the benefit of his note-books from Nijni Novgorod and elsewhere as soon as possible.