22 



TROPICAL EDUCATION. 



and the liistory of our f^'lol)o wliich can never adequately 

 be appreciated except beneath tlie searcliing and all too 

 garish rays of a tropical sun. 



Wlieiiever I meet a cultiAaled man who knows his 

 Tropics — and more particularly one wlio lias known his 

 Tropics during the formative period of meiital develop- 

 ment, say from eighteen to thirty — 1 feel instinctively 

 that he possesses certain keys of man and nature, certain 

 clues to the problems of the world we live in, not 

 possessed in anything li^:e the same degree by the mere 

 average annual output of Oxford or of Heidelberg. I 

 foel that we talk like Freemasons together — we of the 

 Higher Brotherhood who have worshipped the sun, 

 2)r(sse7itiorcm chum, in his own nearer temples. 



Let me begin by positing an extreme parallel. How 

 obviously inadequate is the conception of life enjoyed by 

 the ordinary Laplander or the most intelligent Fuegian! 

 Suppose even he has attended the mission school of his 

 native village, and become learned there in all the 

 learning of the Egyptians, up to the extreme level of the 

 sixth standard, yet how feeble must be his idea of the 

 ])lanet on which he moves ! How much must his horizon 

 be cabined, cribbed, confined by the frost and snow, the 

 gloom and poverty, of the bare land around him ! He 

 lives in a dark cold world of scrubby vegetation and scant 

 animal life : a world where human existence is neces- 

 sarily preserved only by ceaseless labour and at severe 

 odds ; a world out of which all the noblest and most 

 beautiful living creatures have been ruthlessly pressed ; 

 a world where nothing great has been or can be ; a world 

 doomed by its mere physical conditions to eternal 



