The West Indies furnishes the plantation labor of Panama and Costa Rica, without which there would be little plantation work done. In the hot and humid banana groves he endures the temperature and handles the huge banana bunches as though born for the job, as perhaps he is. Out from Almirante and Puerto Limon range the tracks of the plantation railroads through hundreds of miles of banana forests, where the black man supplies the labor for the largest farms in the world. Forty or fifty thousand of these people live on and about the plantations of the Atlantic coast and without them the largest agricultural enterprise ever carried on under one management would collapse. The West Indian on the Isthmus is not the West Indian at home. He may live and die on the mainland, but he thinks in terms of the islands from which he came. Like the American Negro, he is of African descent, but his African origin is so remote that no trace of it remains in his consciousness, though it is evident in his psychology. Most of the West Indians about the Canal Zone dream of returning to the islands again. These people of the Caribbean world have a decided race consciousness, and in their thinking and living are a world unto themselves. Separate and distinct from the Greater Antilles and the mainland, they know very little of the continental life and customs, and any attempt to classify them with American Negroes or Europeans raises a set of social problems difficult to solve. [Illustration: BANANAS THIRTY FEET HIGH] To the North American the mental processes of the West Indian are a psychological jungle in which the explorer is soon lost. Perhaps no one has yet essayed to really understand this man, and those who have tried to analyze him maintain that he does not understand himself. Certain it is that he does not trouble himself with any self-analysis. He has enough other things to occupy his attention. With the psychological background of his remote African ancestors, his race characteristics have changed very little since the days when his forefathers were forcibly torn from their native land and deported into savage slavery. [Illustration: SAN BLAS INDIANS HAVE "POKER FACES"] The social sanctions of the West Indian are rigid and well established. The list of forbidden things is long and complex, and of signs, and dreams and portents, strange and powerful, there seems no end. Numerous negatives appear in his social and personal creed, and he who violates these prohibitions must be a courageous soul. To introduce any original, new idea into this scheme of things is a difficult task, and is apt to arouse a whole chain of reactions, complex and mysterious. This man will follow literally any able leadership, but the leader must go in the direction of the established currents of opinion or he will have a hard time of it.