The chief of the immediate problems which confronted the colonists and the officers of the company was the allotment of the land. The company had purchased it, or secured options on it, in large tracts, some of these tracts containing over ten thousand acres each. The colonists had contracted for it in small holdings, varying from a town lot, 25 x 100 feet in size, to a forty-acre tract of plantation land. No more than forty acres were sold to any one on a single contract. The contracts which could be made were, respectively, as follows: Town lots, three sizes, 25 x 100 feet, 50 x 100, and 50 x 150; plantation land, 2-1/2 acres, 5 acres, 10 acres, 20 acres, and 40 acres. The purchaser paid in full or on monthly instalments, as he preferred, being allowed a discount of ten per cent. for cash. According to the terms of the contracts, he did not purchase the land at all, but bought stock in a coöperative company and the land was a gift to him. However, the coöperative company feature was always in the background in the mind of the colonist, and he felt that he was buying the land and almost invariably so termed the transaction. It was the land he had his eye on, and his present anxiety was to have a good piece promptly allotted to him. At the company's headquarters in New York, no plan of subdivision had been formulated further than a general promise in advertising circulars to allot the land in the order of the numbers of the contracts. At first glance, this seemed both fair and feasible, but once on the ground at La Gloria, some very formidable difficulties loomed up. Of the four or five thousand persons who had invested up to that time less than three hundred were at La Gloria, and there was not in Cuba even a list of the people who had made contracts with the company, to say nothing of their respective holdings and the status of their payments. No such list could be obtained from New York under several weeks or perhaps months, and when obtained would be of little value for the reason that there could not possibly be land enough surveyed by that time to allot one half of the thousands of investors. Surveying in this dense tropical forest was necessarily slow work, and progress had been impeded by the long-continued rains.