TROPICAL EDUCATION, 23 



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 



