A MAYA MONUMENT AT COPÁN Drawing by A. López Rodezno, Director of the Honduran School of Fine Arts.

tired man) climbs in to rest from the long slow walk. Usually several carts travel together, so the trip furnishes a certain modicum of communal recreation.

The finest, most perfectly ripened mangoes are rushed to the capital by the infrequent trucks. The fruit is packed with extreme care in bull's-hide bags. These bags are made from the major part of a single hide-hairy side out so cut as to give a flap about a foot square on the bottom. The material is curved around this base and has only one vertical seam. The base and the side seam are closed in

baseball style with a soft thong, about a sixteenth of an inch in diameter, the holes for the stitches first being punched with a locally made auger. The fruit is covered with several layers of banana leaves and the bag carefully laced across the top with thong. A few men make such containers for sale to their neighbors, but the more common practice is for each farmer to make his own bags from hides which he himself has dried.

Although there are some very valuable gold mines in Honduras, so little of this metal is worked into jewelry that it can. scarcely be called a typical craft, as it is in Nicaragua, for example, or to a lesser degree in Guatemala and Mexico. There are very few men outside of the capital, Tegucigalpa, who do any really fine silver work. The shops are usually feeders for buyers who give definite orders to the craftsmen, even defining the type of design to be used. This is largely the fault of the United States tourist trade. We want something just like what we saw someone else wearing. So the hands in Mexico and Peru and Honduras must forget their native impulses and make Micky Mice and eagles and what we think an ancient or modern Indian head should look like. Of course, there are always, in every land, men like López Rodezno of Tegucigalpa who walk their independent way, producing works of art that will go down to other generations. In general, the Mayan figures from the ruins at Copán, and from the very excellent reproductions in Concordia Park, furnish most of the motifs for Honduran silverwork-heads, seated figures, occasionally animal heads or complex conventional designs from the ancient glyphs.

A really good ceramics factory, the Copanyl, is situated in the outskirts of Tegucigalpa. Here advanced techniques are used to develop long wearing and

artistic products. Tableware and hollow articles are made, and they are finished in a hard glaze that is extremely durable. But pottery of a sort is made everywhere! The pots are fired in the same adobe ovens in which bread is baked, but for the pottery, dried cow-dung is burned in preference to the sticks of wood generally employed. Naturally these adobe ovens cannot reach the tremendous and perfectly controlled heat necessary for proper glazing, or for producing a smooth, even, and hard article. Even so, many of the native articles have a soft tone that is charming. Where families are isolated, each has its own oven for bread and pottery. In villages, the ceramic work is usually done by one or two families "dedicated" to this craft. It is to be hoped that from the Copanyl factory and from the tremendously valuable work of the School of Fine Arts a number of real craftsmen and craftswomen may emerge-Hondurans who will go back into their villages and lift the general level of production in this most indispensable field.

Many crafts are now being taught to hands that have been accustomed to knives and guns, and to restless young hands. President Carías has developed an amazing institution in his Central Penitentiary in Tegucigalpa. In the first place this national prison seems really clean, and the buildings appear comfortable. The food is excellent (I ate some right in the big kitchen) and the men appear healthy and well cared for. The general attitude is one of a large, well-disciplined school, with almost no evidence of fear or servility. On entrance the men are interviewed, and every effort is made to fit the prisoners into tasks for which they are suited-weaving, basketry, shoe-making, silver-work, tailoring, machine-shop work. Only repeaters, murderers who killed in cold blood, and hardened thieves

are excluded from such excellent opportunities to learn trades and to build up, by the sale of finished products, a reserve to take with them when released.

A strange outgrowth has developed-a boys' school, right in the prison compound! This started as a small reform school, but now has an enrollment of over four hundred boys, most of whom have no police record at all. The students include juvenile delinquents, vagrants, and also boys whose teachers or parents have asked that they be admitted, since they were too high-spirited for family or school control. There are regular academic classes through high school, but most of the time is given to vocational training, the majority of the teachers being prisoners on good behavior. There are carpenters, musicians, weavers, leather workers, cobblers. It certainly is an interesting compound. A boy's band plays a marimba in one patio, and men and boys wander, unattended, everywhere. Even the worst criminals, who are put to rock-breaking, are neatly dressed and appear healthy. They sit talking and work

ing under big shade trees in a separate patio, to which the boys are forbidden. entrance. The impression one takes away from a trip to the Penitentiary is that it is a real reform institution.

The north coast of Honduras is almost a "world within a world." For many years the United Fruit Co. has dominated the economic life and to a large degree the culture of this area. From Belize so many Negroes emigrated to this part of Honduras and intermarried that it is a region with almost no color distinction. Another interesting result is that the prevailing language of all classes in this section is

English, rather than Spanish, although, of course, both are spoken. Naturally the majority of the hands in this area are employed in picking and packing bananas for United Fruit, which furnishes neat sturdy houses for the employees, and retains a salary deduction for medical care, retirement, and sickness insurance. There are schools and hospitals and employees' commissaries. Where farmers maintain their own independent banana groves, the fruit is almost always bought up by the company. However, the Hondurans themselves have many other north coast industries, tanning, shoe making, production of

henequen bags and rope. And, of course, there are always the small stores and independent markets of the villages.

After almost twenty years in and out of Latin America, I still find myself saying "Panama hats," although I know perfectly well that the best of the breed are born in Ecuador or Honduras. Near the very tiny town of Santa Barbara there are groves of fan-shaped palm trees that yield the long fibered junco green when fresh, but turning a beautiful off-white when dried. There is a hat factory in the town, but most of the work is done in private homes in Santa Barbara itself, or out through the hot green valleys and hills all around the village. These craftsmen are ingenious in their other junco work, also. There are lovely purses and mats and any number of tiny lapel decorations made of this very fine fiber. The broader, rougher palm fibers are used for coarser hats, for shopping bags, and for semifirm baskets of various kinds.

Of course there are many, many other industries, each vitally important to the artisan who does the work. Henequen fields lift millions of bright green swords into the hot moist air. This is a comparatively new crop, but it already furnishes fiber for bags and for strong rope both for domestic use and for export. Tanning is still a rather small venture, but is growing.

Alligator and snake skins come from the North Coast and especially from the marshy jungles of the Mosquitia Territory. These skins are cured locally and sent to Tegucigalpa where they are made. into beautiful bags, belts, and purses. There are charming knitted and crocheted articles from the small but extremely individual town of Ojojona. Fairly firm artistic pottery can be found in small quantities in Yuscarán, and the bull's horn cornets on the farms near Choluteca are well worth listening to.

In fact, brown and white and black fingers are busy and capable through all the towns and villages of this beautiful green republic. But the products are. seldom for commercial use in more than a narrow local sense. However, as the airplane becomes a more accepted part of communications, and as roads are improved over this unequal land, greater industrialization will be inevitable. Meanwhile, tourists will continue to climb up and down Tegucigalpa's steep stony streets, will peer at the charming old colonial homes, will take pictures in the flower-filled plazas. But to those fortunate foreigners, who have humbly tried to know the people themselves their life and their work-the brown (often soiled) Honduran hands will always seem beautiful and wonderfully clever.

THE Second Pan American Congress of Mining Engineering and Geology was held at Hotel Quitandinha, in Petropolis, the summer capital of Brazil, October 1-15, 1946. It is reported that there were 134 official delegates to the Congress; registration for the various commissions exceeded 350. Twelve countries were represented, including Canada. The First Congress was held in Santiago, Chile, January 1942.

The Second Congress was organized by Dr. Antonio José Alves de Souza, Chairman, and Dr. Anibal Alves Bastos, Secretary-Treasurer, Brazilian Section, Pan American Institute of Mining Engineering and Geology. Dr. Souza's official position is General Director of the National Department of Mineral Production.

The official United States delegation to the Second Congress is listed below:

Chairman:

Paul C. Daniels, Counselor of Embassy, American Embassy, Rio de Janeiro.

Delegates:

Dr. R. R. Sayers, Director, Bureau of Mines, Department of the Interior.

Dr. Edward Steidle, The Pennsylvania State College, State College, Pennsylvania.

Dr. William E. Wrather, Director, Geological Survey, Department of the Interior. Technical Advisers:

Clarence C. Brooks, Counselor of Embassy for Economic Affairs, American Embassy, Rio de Janeiro.

Emerson I. Brown, Minerals Attaché, Rio de Janeiro.

Ivan G. Harmon, Petroleum Attaché, American Embassy, Rio de Janeiro.

Roger Rhoades, Chief Geologist, Bureau of Reclamation, Department of the Interior.

Special Assistant to the Chairman:

Clarence A. Wendel, Division of International Resources, Department of State.

Ten additional mineral engineers and technologists represented the United States at the second congress, including Dr. Charles Will Wright, Secretary-Treasurer, United States Section, Pan American Institute of Mining Engineering and Geology, and Dr. W. D. Johnston, Jr., United States Geological Survey. Dr. Johnston exhibited the new Geological Map of South America, sponsored by the Geological Society of America.

There were 12 commissions: (1) Metallic and Non-metallic Ore, (2) Geology, Paleontology, Mineralogy, and Petrology, (3) Fuel, (4) Metallurgy and Iron Industry, (5) Ore Industry, (6) Ore Treatment and Concentration, (7) Mining Industry, (8) Mining Economy, Trade and Exchange of Minerals, (9) Technical and Scientific Training, (10) Mineral and Underground Waters, (11) Estimate and Exploitation of Deposits, (12) Conclusions arrived at in the First Congress.

There were more than 150 technical papers covering the entire range of subject matter of the commissions. About 25 of these papers were presented by engineers and technologists in the United States and duly approved for publication in the printed proceedings of the Congress.

It was the honor of the writer as chairman of the United States section, PanAmerican Institute of Mining Engineering and Geology, to be elected one of three