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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.— SUPPLEMENT. 



THE GKEAT TEOPICAL FALLACY. 



By J. AEBUTHNOT WILSON. 



ONCE upon a time I believed in the tropics, 

 but that was a great many years ago ; I 

 have seen too much of those wretched pretenders 

 to believe in them any more, and I have made 

 up my mind to denounce and expose them before 

 an indignant world. The hoary old deceivers 

 shall deceive no longer, if word of mine can strip 

 the tawdry disguises from their shabby faces ; no 

 longer shall they hide themselves behind their 

 cloak of gorgeous colors, or trick themselves out 

 hypocritically with flaunting flowers, beautiful 

 birds, and brilliant butterflies. They have decked 

 their nakedness too many centuries already in 

 these false theatrical properties, and now they 

 must come out into the open light of day, to ex- 

 hibit the rags and tatters which form their every- 

 day vestments. To put the whole matter in a 

 nutshell, there are no tropics. The entire .con- 

 ception is a sham and a delusion, an elaborate 

 humbug perpetrated by whole generations of 

 travelers, the baseless fabric of a disordered 

 dream. 



Of course I am not going to deny all those 

 dreadful astronomical facts which we learned in 

 our hapless childhood at a fee of two guineas 

 extra, under the mysterious designation, " Use 

 of the globes." I am quite prepared to admit 

 that Cancer and Capricorn have a real external 

 existence, and that the sun annually performs all 

 kinds of antics when he reaches their invisible 

 limit, only discernible to nautical eyes by the 

 aid of a sextant and a marine binocular. I have 

 had the evidence of my own senses to the pe- 

 culiar way in which my shadow has run north, 

 south, east, or west, and finally disappeared un- 

 der my feet, after I had once crossed that intan- 

 gible barrier of twenty-three something north 

 (thank Heaven, I've forgotten the minutes, though 

 the degrees will haunt my memory till the end of 

 my days) ; and I have experienced all the hor- 

 rors of a vertical sun, pouring his red-hot rays 

 straight down on my devoted head for months 

 and years together. These physical and geo- 

 graphical phenomena I am not going for a mo- 

 ment to dispute, nor do I wish to join the eccen- 

 tric squadron of earth-flatteners, who march 

 solemnly forth under Mr. Hampden's guidance to 

 do battle with Galileo, Copernicus, Newton, Mr. 

 Wallace, and the astronomer royal. The trop- 



ics of science may rest undisturbed ; but the 

 tropics of poets, painters, lovers, romancists, and 

 travelers, I venture to assert, do not exist, and 

 never did exist, elsewhere than in the fertile im- 

 agination which called their picture into being. 



We all know that picture by heart. In the 

 background a glorious sunset, bathing the moun- 

 tain-peaks in a flood of golden halo and crimson 

 light ; at the mid distance a waterfall leaping 

 down the rocks, spanned by a rainbow, and half 

 hidden with a mass of gigantic ferns ; in the fore- 

 ground a group of palm-trees, their feathery 

 branches drooping in a graceful curve, and their 

 long stems rising grandly toward the sky, whose 

 blue expanse throws up in strong relief their leafy 

 crowns. Among the lesser trees, parrots of every 

 hue — red, green, white, and yellow — chatter and 

 scream in circling flight; while monkeys grin in 

 the underwood, and leap in vain at the gayly-paint- 

 ed butterflies that flit unheeding past. Creepers 

 with huge crimson blossoms hang pendent from 

 every bough; orchids of strange shape and color 

 carpet the moist soil beneath ; and bushes of cac- 

 tus or euphorbia spread their quaint jointed stems 

 and yellow bloom over all the barer patches in 

 the forest shade. That is the sort of thing that 

 we all picture to ourselves when we talk in our 

 pristine ignorance of tropical scenery. 



Well, the picture bears about as much resem- 

 blance to the reality as Aladdin's palace at Drury 

 Lane bears to Rag Fair or the Seven Dials. The 

 tropics of real life are no gorgeous scenes of glossy 

 verdure and brilliant coloring, but vast expanses 

 of dry and dusty plain, hideous rocky masses of 

 shapeless and tangled vegetation, interspersed 

 with squalid patches of straggling human tillage, 

 and filthy collections of tumble-down human huts. 

 It is a sad truth for the poet and the painter, who 

 would fain cling to that romantic faith in " sum- 

 mer isles of Eden lying 'mid dark purple spheres 

 of sea ; " but a truth it is nevertheless, and as 

 such I feel it my duty to preach it for the further 

 destruction of the Great Tropical Fallacy, whose 

 flimsy pretenses I have myself unearthed. 



I am not alone in my belief. Mr. Wallace, 

 of Malay Archipelago fame ; Mr. Bates, the natu- 

 ralist on the Amazons ; Prof. Agassiz, who went 

 on a journey to Brazil, and fifty other experienced 

 travelers, have all announced the same truth be- 



