immigrants. They recognize that some smuggling constantly goes on, and that a lot of very bad bugs have already found their way across national borders and are well established in their new homes. So an international exchange of good bugs has been instituted.

reduced the number of the scales that the pest was practically under control and has never since been able to cause serious damage to the orange trees. Since then the beetle has also been artificially introduced into other orange-growing countries-New Zealand, South Africa, the Hawaiian Islands, Portugal, southern France, Italy, Syria, and Egypt-everywhere it has repeated its successful at

A good bug, in my present meaning, is one that fights a bad bug-in other words, is a predacious or parasitic enemy of the bad bug. The international exchange of good bugs has been set up on the basis of the facts, some already recited: (1) that all bad bugs have special bug enemies in their native habitats, (2) that bad bug immigrants usually arrive in their new homes without their accompanying parasites, thus being able to increase in numbers with terrifying rapidity, and (3) that these parasites can be found in the native homes of the bad bugs and introduced into their new homes, to go on with their beneficent work of keeping the bad bugs in check.

tack on the scales.

The success of this experiment was so striking that it led to a great development of this way of fighting immigrant bad bugs and now the international exchange of good bugs has become one of the most important practices in modern economic entomology. The European browntail and gypsy moths are being fought in this way in New England, more than thirty species of imported parasites having been tried out against them, with much success in some cases, although little or none in others.

When the cottony cushion scale, that came to California from Australia about 1868, increased to such numbers as literally to threaten the entire Californian orange industry, an American entomologist went to Australia and sent back a few little tin boxes full of small lady-bird beetles of a kind which he found to be a confirmed devourer of cottony cushion scales. In fact, apparently it eats nothing else. These little predacious beetles increased with extraordinary rapidity -there were so many cottony cushion scales in the California orange orchards ready to be eaten and converted into new beetles--and had soon so much

In Hawaii a small leaf-hopper of Australian origin which attacks sugar cane became so abundant in the first decade of the century as seriously to threaten the very existence of the great sugar plantations of the islands. Two entomologists were sent to Australia to look for its parasites. Consignments of several different kinds were sent back and, after being allowed to increase in confinement for a time, the parasites were liberated in the plantations. Some of them began to multiply rapidly and the leaf-hoppers to decrease correspondingly. In 1907 one large plantation whose crop had dropped from 10,954 tons in 1904 to 1,120 tons in 1905 and to 826 tons in

482

1906, produced 11,630 tons, a result almost entirely due to the good work of the imported parasites.

JAPANESE VS. ITALIAN

IN ITALY a degenerate little immigrant

cence. Thus, Dr. Howard states that a certain parasitic fly introduced, under his direction, to fight both the gypsy and brown-tail moths has already taken kindly to a large number of American hosts and has become an apparently important

had so increased in numbers as seriously to threaten the complete extinction of the mulberry trees and consequently of the silk industry of the country. But a minute parasite of this scale introduced. by an Italian entomologist from Japan and America conquered the pest and brought about its approximate extinction throughout a large part of Italy.

But fighting pests with parasites is not all so simple or so successful as these selected examples of the process would indicate. Sometimes, indeed often, the introduced parasite seems to be unable to get a strong foothold in its new home. Sometimes, unless it is of a kind which attacks only a single host species, it lets its attention wander in its new home to other native insects and does little or no harm to the special bad bug it ought to fight. Sometimes it brings along with it its own parasites, for

Great fleas have little fleas
Upon their backs to bite 'em,
And little fleas have lesser fleas,
And so ad infinitum.

These secondary, or hyper-parasites, may not only keep in check the imported parasites but may also spread to other useful native parasites and, by checking them, do more harm than good. Or the introduced parasites may be attacked by native hyper-parasites and thus never get a chance to do the good work they are brought in to do.

Sometimes, too, a parasite may require two kinds of hosts in which to complete its life history and the second host may not be present in the new home of the introduced parasite. On the other hand, a parasite introduced to fight a particular bad bug immigrant may fight not only that immigrant but also some other native bad bugs and thus multiply its benefi

which at least half a dozen are of much economic importance.

DANGERS OF IMPORTING THEM LTOGETHER this matter of the

A international exchange of good bugs

to fight bad ones is one calling for much study and not to be undertaken with the confidence of ignorance. Tampering with the "balance of nature" is something not to be indulged in recklessly. The importation of the mongoose into Jamaica and the rabbit into Australia are the classic examples of the uncomfortable surprise that may be in store for the well-intentioned rearranger of Zoogeography. If the entomologists are not careful we may have another classic example in the case of the introduction from one country into another of some presumably good bug that may go wrong in its new home.

But we may trust the entomologists to be careful. They will be, if they are good entomologists. And there is no doubt at all that they have done and are doing some very useful things through their international exchange of good bugs as an offset to the international exchange of bad bugs which goes on constantly, in some degree, despite all our quarantines.

The insect-fighting entomologists of this country are waging a continuous war of national defense. There are not many of them and the enemy at the gates is numbered by millions. It is a modern instance of Horatius at the bridge. If Horatius should be overwhelmed there will be disaster for us all. It will not be the spectacular disaster of an army in flight or a besieged city conquered. It will be just the drab disaster of not having

enough to eat. The enemy will eat and we shall starve. Let us wish all power to the arm of Horatius.

T

WO years ago, in the jungle of Darien, at a little frontier settlement named Yavisa, I was bargaining with the Negroid Indian chief of the village for a crew to take me up the Chucunaque River, when I saw three Indian girls appear from behind a hut, cross the village street, and disappear behind another hut on the other side. My sensations were those that a scientist would have if he were melting some lead and saw it suddenly change into gold, for I had as unexpectedly seen a legend of centuries become a reality before my eyes. These girls had white skin and golden yellow hair!

That was my first view of the now famous White Indians. A year later, following a second expedition, I came out of the same jungle, having seen four hundred of them, and bringing back to civilization two boys and a girl as living specimens for the scientists to study. For the last six months they have lived part of the time at my camp in Canada and part of the time in a home in Washington, D. C., where government experts and scientists in anthropology, biology, and genetics have been trying to decide whether they are biological "mutations" from brown Indians or are descendants of Norwegians who came to America long before Columbus's voyage.

When this article is published, I shall be in that region again, with several of these scientists, equipped to study these strange phenomena in their native land, and to explore their country, where they promise me we shall find stone ruins of cities their ancestors inhabited.

My astonishment at my first view of White Indians may be better imagined. when I explain that Yavisa is at the head of navigation of the Chucunaque River in Darien, or Eastern Panama, and the farthest outpost of anything like civilization, in an unexplored tropical wilderness. Yavisa is peopled by Negroid Indian half-breeds, and is a trading post to which "tame" jungle Indians come to barter. The only white men that ever visit the place are a very occasional trader, or, as in my case, an engineer looking for rubber. I had as little reason to expect to see a white woman in Yavisa as David Livingstone would have had to meet Queen Victoria in equatorial Africa. And I had seen three! And savages, at that; for they wore only loin cloths, and stepped the jungle path with the free, natural grace of the Indian.

They had come and gone so quickly that I had only the one glimpse of them. But that glimpse was enough to excite my eager interest, for the legend of the White Indians is as old as American history, and in twenty years as a civil engineer,

484

practising my profession up and down both hemispheres, I had heard it on many occasions and in many lands from frontiersmen and natives. Columbus himself declared that he had seen them. Cortez found a hundred of them imprisoned in Montezuma's palace in Mexico City and venerated as "the children of the sun." Vancouver saw them on Vancouver Island in 1792, and Commander Stiles of our own Navy claimed to have seen the remnants of the same group in 1848. Humboldt saw about a hundred White Indians in Colombia.

STRANGERS MAY NOT ENTER

BUT

I

UT, like every one else, I did not really believe in White Indians. attributed the stories to hallucination, or to the mistaking of albinoes or halfbreeds for really white people. But the girls I had seen were not, I was convinced, any of these. I have seen thousands of half-breeds, of many mixtures, and there is an unmistakable something about them that reveals their hybrid origin. These These girls gave no such impression. I asked the village chief about them, and he told me they lived in a hut outside his village, with a man of the same appearance. They did not mingle with his people, and he explained that no one would dare molest them, for fear of the vengeance of their tribe. They came, he said, from far inland, up the Chucunaque River, where no Negro or tame Indian dared to go, for the savages there had forbidden it and were warriors of such prowess that their edict was respected. No white man, even, had ever gone into that country and returned. A detachment of the Panamanian army had tried it and had been exterminated. The White Indians were a numerous tribe, he added, and were allies of the savage Wallas, Mortis, and Cunas Bravos.

I resolved to call upon the strangers. I followed the path the chief indicated, and in half a mile came on a little clearing, in which was a pole-and-palm hut, with its floor several feet above the ground and its "doorsteps" a log with notches cut in it for a foothold in ascending to the

entrance. After much calling in English and Spanish, the three girls appeared; and after many signs of my good intentions, they ventured to the ground and accepted the present of a handful of freshly minted ten-cent pieces. They let me look at their golden locks closely enough for me to be certain they were not dyed, and I was equally sure that the whiteness of their skin was not an artificial calcine. Their eyes were not black, but a light brown, proving that they were not the usual kind of Indian, nor, on the other hand, albinoes either. It was growing dusk, but I managed to get some snapshots of them. They spoke neither English nor Spanish.

Returning to the boat, in which I had come from Panama to Yavisa, I told my two comrades of my find, but found them unimpressed. I might think what I pleased, but no White Indians for them. My invitation to join me in a visit to the clearing after dinner, to call on the man of the family, was greeted with emphatic refusal. I might go and get myself killed if I liked. And, indeed, their judgment on that point was better than mine. I went to the hut in the moonlight and called, and the man came out, not to greet me but to rush into the jungle. A little reflection convinced me that he would probably circle behind me and put an arrow into my back, so I lost no time in returning to the boat, no wiser than I had left.

THE

BEAUTY OF PHYSIQUE

HE next morning, we made a oneday journey up the river beyond Yavisa. By noon we had come into a region that promised to disclose just such a valley of rubber lands as I had dreamed was there. I urged my companions to go. farther. But they had had enough of jungles, and we turned back.

And, then, rounding a bend in the Chucunaque, we came head-on upon the most startling apparition I have ever seen. A canoe came toward us, and in the bow stood a naked savage with a white body, whose yellow hair, falling to his shoulders, was held in order by a gold

woman did not vary a heart-beat in the rhythm of their strokes as they plied the canoe to pass directly by us. The man eyed us with a truly regal pride and disdain, and passed us by without troubling to turn his head to see whether or not we intended to follow. His whole manner said more plainly than words: "I am king here; what are you doing in my domain?"

This uncanny vision settled any doubts my companions had about exploring further. The tales of the Negroid chief, about the savages upstream, had been given a most startling confirmation. They had seen enough. "We are no

ered, after such an incomplete exploration. And my disappointment was doubled at my inability to follow the trail of the White Indians who, I now felt sure, were no mirage of fanciful pioneers but a scientific fact.

I lingered in Panama after my companions had gone on to the States. I told my friends in the Canal Zone Government about my White Indians, and I got the incredulous sympathy usually paid to a respected citizen who has gone a little off his head. They all believed that I honestly thought I had seen them, but they thought it was either "a touch o' sun" or that I had seen albinoes or half