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Thus, if the insect or bird that assists in the fertilisation of the vanilla could be introduced into and would live in India, the growers of that plant would be relieved of much trouble, and it might be thoroughly naturalised. Judging from my experience, it would be useless to attempt the acclimature of the scarlet-runner bean in Chontales unless the humble-bee were also introduced.
Omitting the peculiar species and those generally distributed in Tropical America, we have thus forty-three that are found in Chontales and in Mexico or the United States, and sixty-one that are found in Chontales and countries lying to the southward.
It is the principal mining centre of Chontales. There are a great number of gold mines in its vicinity, several of which are worked by intelligent Frenchmen. The gold and silver mines of Libertad are richer than those of Santo Domingo, and many of the owners of them have extracted great quantities of the precious metals.
The gold-mining village of Santo Domingo is situated in the province of Chontales, Nicaragua, in latitude 12 degrees 16 minutes north and longitude 84 degrees 59 minutes west, nearly midway between the Atlantic and the Pacific, where Central America begins to widen out northward of the narrow isthmus of Panama and Costa Rica.
H.W. Bates has enumerated 242 of these in a paper "On the Longicorn Coleoptera of Chontales, Nicaragua," published in the "Transactions of the Entomological Society" for 1872. In an interesting summary of the results he gives the following analysis of the range of the species: Peculiar to Chontales: 133 species. Common to Chontales and Mexico: 38 species.
I think that the Lenca Indians were the ancient inhabitants of Chontales, that they were the "Chontals" of the Nahuatls or Aztecs of the Pacific side of the country, and that they were partly conquered, and their territories encroached upon by the latter before the arrival of the Spaniards, as some of the Aztec names of places in Nicaragua do not appear to be such as could be given originally by the first inhabitants; thus Juigalpa, pronounced Hueygalpa, is southern Aztec for "Big Town."
These we were told were the last we should see on the road to Chontales. On the other side of the range the descent was very steep, and the road was carried down the precipitous and rocky slope in a series of zigzags, so that we saw the mules a few score yards in advance directly under our feet.
We were now close to the boundary of the province of Matagalpa, and began again to hear of the drought that had destroyed most of the maize crop in that province, although in Chontales, on one side of it, we had had rather more rain than usual, and in Segovia, on the other, we had seen that the crops were excellent.
The birds I sent to England proved nearly conclusively that the Costa-Rican sub-province included Chontales in Nicaragua, and that the boundary between it and the sub-province of Southern Mexico and Guatemala must be sought for more to the north-west.
I saw also in the Natural History magazines notices of their scarcity in all parts of England. The great mortality amongst the insects of Chontales in 1872 has some bearing on the origin of species, for in times of such great epidemics we may suspect that the gradations that connect extreme forms of the same species may become extinct.
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