34 TROPICAL EDUCATION. 



the Tropics are even now the rule of life ; the colder 

 regions are but an abnormal and outlying eccentricity 

 of nature. Yet it is from this starved and dwarfed 

 and impoverished northern area that most of us have 

 formed our views of life, to the total exclusion of the 

 wider, richer, more varied world that calls for our 

 admiration in tropical latitudes. 



Insensibly this richness and vividness of nature all 

 around one, on a first visit to the Tropics, sinks into 

 one's mind, and produces profound, though at first 

 unconscious, modifications in one's whole mode of re- 

 garding man and his universe. Especially is this the 

 case in early life, when the character is still plastic and 

 the eye still keen : pictures are formed in that brilliant 

 sunshine and under those dim arches of hot grey sky 

 that photograph themselves for ever on the lasting 

 tablets of the human memory. John Stuart Mill in his 

 Autobiography dwells lovingly, I remember, on the pro- 

 found effect produced on himself by his childish visits to 

 Jeremy Bentham at Ford Abbey in Dorsetshire, on the 

 delightful sense of space and freedom and generous 

 expansion given to his mind by the mere act of living 

 and moving in those stately halls and wide airy gardens. 

 Every university man must look back with pleasure of 

 somewhat the same sort to the free breezy memories of 

 the quadrangles and common rooms of Christ Church 

 or of Trinity. But in the tropical university everybody 

 passes his time in arcades of Greek or Pompeian airiness : 

 the palm-trees wave and whisper around his head as he 

 sits for coolness on his wide verandah ; the humming- 

 birds dart from flower to flower on the delicate bouquets 



