by gripping the bark with his claws. The rays of my electric
flash-light have often caught him high over my head against the gray
palm. Height does not daunt him. He will go up till he reaches the
nuts, if it be a hundred feet. With his powerful nippers he severs
the stem, choosing always a nut that is big and ripe. Descending the
palm, he tears off the fibrous husk, which, at first thought, it
would seem impossible for him to do. He tears it fiber by fiber, and
always from that end under which the three eye-holes are situated.
With these exposed, he begins hammering on one of them until he has
enlarged the opening so that he can insert one of the sharp points
of his claw into it. By turning his claw backward and forward he
scoops out the meat and regales himself luxuriously.

This is his simplest method, along the line of least resistance, but
let the nut be refractory, and he seizes it by the point of a claw
and beats it against a rock until he smashes it. This plan failing,
he will carry the stubborn nut to the top of the tree again and hurl
it to the earth to crack it. And if at first he does not succeed, he
will make other trips aloft with the husked nut, dropping it again
and again until at last it is shattered and lies open to his claws.

It is said that if a drop of oil be placed on the long and delicate
antennae of these crabs they die almost instantly. We have a
somewhat similar rumor with respect to salt and a bird's tail.
Seldom does a robber crab linger to be oiled, and so other means of
destroying him, or, at least, of guarding against his depredations,
are sought. With the rat, who bites the flower and gnaws the young
nuts, this crab is the principal enemy of the planter. The tree
owner who can afford it, nails sheets of tin or zinc around the tree
a dozen feet from the earth. Neither rat nor crab can pass this
slippery band, which gives no claw-hold. Thousands of trees are thus
protected, but usually these are in possession of white men, for tin
is costly and the native is poor.

The ingenious native, however, employs another means of saving the
fruit of his groves. He climbs the palm-trunk in the daytime, and
forty feet above the ground encircles it with dirt and leaves. On
his mat for the night's slumber, he smiles to think of the revenge
he shall have. For the crab ascends and passes the puny barrier to
select and fell his nuts, but when in his backward way he descends,
he forgets the curious bunk