Science in Arcady | Page 9

But it has always
seemed to me, nevertheless, that certain elements of a liberal education
are to be acquired tropically which can never be acquired in a
temperate, still less in an arctic or antarctic academy. This is more
especially true, I allow, in the particular cases of the biologist and the
sociologist; but it is also true in a somewhat less degree of the mere
common arts course, and the mere average seeker after liberal culture.
Vast aspects of nature and human life exist which can never adequately
be understood aright except in tropical countries; vivid side-lights are
cast upon our own history and the history of our globe which can never
adequately be appreciated except beneath the searching and all too
garish rays of a tropical sun.

Whenever I meet a cultivated man who knows his Tropics--and more
particularly one who has known his Tropics during the formative
period of mental development, say from eighteen to thirty--I feel
instinctively that he possesses certain keys of man and nature, certain
clues to the problems of the world we live in, not possessed in anything
like the same degree by the mere average annual output of Oxford or of
Heidelberg. I feel that we talk like Freemasons together--we of the
Higher Brotherhood who have worshipped the sun, _præsentiorem
deum_, in his own nearer temples.
Let me begin by positing an extreme parallel. How obviously
inadequate is the conception of life enjoyed by the ordinary Laplander
or the most intelligent Fuegian! Suppose even he has attended the
mission school of his native village, and become learned there in all the
learning of the Egyptians, up to the extreme level of the sixth standard,
yet how feeble must be his idea of the planet on which he moves! How
much must his horizon be cabined, cribbed, confined by the frost and
snow, the gloom and poverty, of the bare land around him! He lives in
a dark cold world of scrubby vegetation and scant animal life: a world
where human existence is necessarily preserved only by ceaseless
labour and at severe odds; a world out of which all the noblest and most
beautiful living creatures have been ruthlessly pressed; a world where
nothing great has been or can be; a world doomed by its mere physical
conditions to eternal poverty, discomfort, and squalor. For green fields
he has snow and reindeer moss: for singing birds and flowers, the
ptarmigan and the tundra. How can he ever form any fitting conception
of the glory of life--of the means by which animal and vegetable
organisms first grew and flourished? How can he frame to himself any
reasonable picture of civilised society, or of the origin and development
of human faculty and human organisation?
Somewhat the same, though of course in a highly mitigated degree, are
the disadvantages under which the pure temperate education labours,
when compared with the education unconsciously drunk in at every
pore by an intelligent mind in tropical climates. And fully to understand
this pregnant educational importance of the Tropics we must consider
with ourselves how large a part tropical conditions have borne in the

development of life in general, and of human life and society in
particular.
The Tropics, we must carefully remember, are the norma of nature: the
way things mostly are and always have been. They represent to us the
common condition of the whole world during by far the greater part of
its entire existence. Not only are they still in the strictest sense the
biological head-quarters: they are also the standard or central type by
which we must explain all the rest of nature, both in man and beast, in
plant and animal.
The temperate and arctic worlds, on the other hand, are a mere passing
accident in the history of our planet: a hole-and-corner development; a
special result of the great Glacial epoch, and of that vast slow secular
cooling which preceded and led up to it, from the beginning of the
Miocene or Mid-Tertiary period. Our European ideas, poor, harsh, and
narrow, are mainly formed among a chilled and stunted fauna and flora,
under inclement skies, and in gloomy days, all of which can give us but
a very cramped and faint conception of the joyous exuberance, the
teeming vitality, the fierce hand-to-hand conflict, and the victorious
exultation of tropical life in its full free development.
All through the Primary and Secondary epochs of geology, it is now
pretty certain, hothouse conditions practically prevailed almost without
a break over the whole world from pole to pole. It may be true, indeed,
as Dr. Croli believes (and his reasoning on the point I confess is fairly
convincing), that from time to time glacial periods in one or other
hemisphere broke in for a while upon the genial