TROPICAL EDUCATION. 29 



has been waged by the Darwins, the Huxleys, and the 

 Miillers on the one hand, against the Cuviers, the Owens, 

 and the Virchows on the other. 



Still, it is not only in biology, as I said just now, 

 that a taste of the Tropics in early life exerts a marked 

 widening and philosophic influence upon a man's whole 

 mental horizon. In ten thousand ways, in that great 

 tropical university, men feel themselves in closer touch 

 than elsewhere with the ultimate facts and truths of 

 nature. I don't know whether it is all fancy and pre- 

 conceived opinion, but I often imagine when I talk with 

 new-met men that I can detect a certain difference in 

 tone and feeling at first sight between those who have 

 and those who have not passed the Tropical Tripos. In 

 the Tropics, in short, we seem to get down to the very 

 roots of things. Thousands of questions, social, political, 

 economical, ethical, present themselves at once in new 

 and more engagingly simple aspects. Difficulties vanish, 

 distinctions disappear, conventions fade, clothes are 

 reduced to their least common measure, man stands 

 forth in his native nakedness. Things that in the North 

 we had come to regard as inevitable garments, firing, 

 income tax, morality evaporate or simplify themselves 

 with instructive ease and phantasmagoric readiness. 

 Malthus and the food question assume fresh forms, as 

 in dissolving views, before our very eyes. How are 

 slums conceivable or East Ends possible where every 

 man can plant his own yam and cocoa-nut, and reap 

 their fruit four-hundred-fold ? How can Mrs. Grundy 

 thrive where every woman may rear her own ten 

 children on her ten-rood plot without aid or assistance 



