176 KEW GARDENS 



England know," seems at present the favourite 

 tag of imperially minded journalists. It might 

 be more truly said that only they who know 

 the world know how much England has to be 

 thankful for in the climate we are so ready to 

 abuse. Their eyes are opened to see how Nature 

 in our island has all the loveliest tints on her 

 palette, to paint ever-changing pictures that owe 

 their chief charm to the supposed defect of 

 uncertainty, even as your Didos and Cleopatras 

 varium et mutabile would less surely enchant 

 in the form of stereotyped models of the most 

 admired virtues. 



Then a drawback to tropical scenes on which 

 travellers are emphatically in one tale, is the 

 innumerable plagues bred in such hot air as we 

 imitate at Kew here filtered from its hostile 

 engenderings the maddening mosquitoes that 

 swarm in equatorial forests as on Arctic tundras ; 

 the legions of ants, white, red, and black, that 

 prey upon the traveller's kit and torture his skin 

 like a shirt of Nessus ; harpy moths that have 

 to be driven from one's food ; swarms of earwigs 

 which some African adventurers have found the 

 hatefulest enemy of their march. Kew breeds 

 no serpent or vampire like those haunting natural 



