TROPICAL EDUCATION. 



27 



cataclysm ; I shall take all those for granted at present : 

 \vlmt we are concerned with now are the results it left 

 beliind — the changes which it wrought on fauna and flora 

 iui(l on human society. Especially is it of importance 

 in tliis connection to point out that the Glacial epoch is 

 not yet CMitirely finished — if, indeed, it is ever destined to 

 be finished. We are living still on the fringe of the Ice Age, 

 in a cold and cheerless era, the legacy of the accumu- 

 lated glaciers of the northern and southern snow-fields. 



If once that ice were melted off — ah, well, there is 

 much virtue in an if. Still, Mr. Alfred Eussel Wallace 

 seems to suggest somewhere that the sun is gradually 

 making inroads even now on those great glacier-sheets 

 of the northern cap, just as we know he is doing on the 

 smaller glacier-sheets of Switzerland (most of which are 

 receding), and that in time perhaps (say in a hundred 

 thousand years or so) warm ocean currents may once 

 more penetrate to the very poles themselves. That, 

 however, is neither here nor there. The fact remains 

 that we of Northern Europe live to-day in a cramped, 

 chilled, contracted world ; a world from wdiich all the 

 larger, fiercer, and grander types have either been 

 killed off or driven south ; a w^orld which stands to the 

 full and vigorous world of the Eocene and Miocene 

 periods in somewhat the same relation as Lapland 

 stands to-day to Italy or the Eiviera. 



TJiis being so, it naturally results tliat if we want 

 really to understand the history of life, its origin and its 

 episodes, we must turn nowadays to that part of our 

 planet which still most nearly preserves the original con- 

 ditions—that is to say, the Tropics. And it has always 



