are kept. Sugar, candy, and all other sweet things are only safe on top of inverted tumblers standing in bowls of water, for nothing short of a moat will keep out the ants. But at the same time, this stagnant water may be serving as a breeding-place for mosquitoes. There used to be over forty different kinds of mosquitos on the Isthmus, but nowadays they are very rare.
Another insect pest, however, that has not been abated is the famous "red bug," a tiny tick, smaller than the head of a pin, but big enough to make plenty of trouble. The red bugs live in the grass, and burrow under the skin of human beings and animals and breed there until they are dug out with the point of a knife. Other species of ticks attack horses, cattle and fowls, and are a great pest to farmers in that country. Compared to them the more picturesque and widely feared scorpions and tarantulas do almost no harm. Both the scorpion, who looks like a small lobster with his tail bent up over his head and a sting at the end of it, and the tarantula, a huge spider covered with stiff black hair, are hideously ugly, and their bite or sting is intensely painful. But it is not fatal, as is commonly and erroneously supposed, and for every man that is hurt by a scorpion or tarantula, hundreds of dollars' worth of damage is done by ticks and red bugs.
Before the white men came, there was a large native population on the Isthmus. Some of the Spanish chroniclers place the number of Indians as high as two millions; almost certainly there were more of them than the three hundred and fifty thousand persons, of all races (see page 244), that inhabit that country to-day. The
