Cuap. XIII. HOMEWARD BOUND. 389 
amidst these dull scenes I was quitting a country of perpetual summer, 
where my life had been spent like that of three-fourths of the people in 
gipsy fashion, on the endless streams or in the boundless forests. I 
was leaving the equator, where the well-balanced forces of Nature 
maintained a land-surface and climate that seemed to be typical of 
mundane order and beauty, to sail towards the North Pole, where lay 
my home under crepuscular skies somewhere about fifty-two degrees of 
latitude. It was natural to feel a little dismayed at the prospect of so 
great a change; but now, after three years of renewed experience of 
England, I find how incomparably superior is civilised life, where 
feelings, tastes, and intellect find abundant nourishment, to the spiritual 
sterility of half-savage existence, even if it were passed in the garden of 
Eden. What has struck me powerfully is the immeasurably greater 
diversity and interest of human character and social conditions in a 
single civilised nation, than in equatorial South America, where three 
distinct races of man live together. The superiority of the bleak north 
to tropical regions, however, is only in its social aspect ; for I hold to 
the opinion that, although humanity can reach an advanced state of 
culture only by battling with the inclemencies of nature in high latitudes, 
itis under the equator alone that the perfect race of the future will 
attain to complete fruition of man’s beautiful heritage, the earth. 
The following day, having no wind, we drifted out of the mouth of 
the Para with the current of fresh water that is poured from the mouth 
of the river, and in twenty-four hours advanced in this way seventy 
miles on our road. On the 6th of June, when in 7° 55’ N. lat. and 52° 
30’ W. long., and therefore about 400 miles from the mouth of the 
main Amazons, we passed numerous patches of floating grass mingled 
with tree-trunks and withered foliage. Amongst these masses I espied 
many fruits of that peculiarly Amazonian tree the Ubusst a and 
this was the last I saw of the Great River. 
