TROPICAL EDUCATION. 31 



out upon life with a new outlook, an outlook undimmed 

 by ten thousand preconceptions which hem in the vision 

 and obstruct the view of the mere temperately educated. 

 Nor is it only on the elite of the world that this 

 tropical training has in its own way a widening influence. 

 It is good, of course, for our Galtons to have seen South 

 Africa; good for our Tylors to have studied Mexico; 

 good for our Hookers to have numbered the rhododen- 

 drons and deodars of the Himalayas. I sometimes 

 fancy, even, that in the works of our very greatest 

 stay-at-home thinkers on anthropological or sociological 

 subjects, I detect here and there a certain formalist and 

 schematic note which betrays the want of first-hand 

 acquaintance with the plastic and expansive nature of 

 tropical society. The beliefs and relations of the actual 

 savage have not quite that definiteness of form and 

 expression which our University Professors would fain 

 assign to them. But apart from the widening influence 

 of the Tropics on these picked minds, there is a widen- 

 ing influence exerted insensibly on the very planters or 

 merchants, the rank and file of European settlers, which 

 can hardly fail to impress all those who have lived 

 amongst them. The cramping effect of the winter cold 

 and the artificial life is all removed. Men live in a freer, 

 wider, warmer air ; their doors and windows stand open 

 day and night; the scent of flowers and the hum of 

 insects blow in upon them with every breeze ; their 

 brother man and sister woman are more patent in every 

 action to their eyes; the world shows itself more 

 frankly ; it has fewer secrets, and readier sympathies. I 

 don't mean to say the result is all gain. Far from it. 



