TROPICAL EDUCATION. 



33 



Gvorvthing material, mental, and moral seems topsy- 

 turvy, wlicre life is real and morals are rudimentary — 

 and unless ho is a very particular fool indeed, what a 

 lot you must really give that blithe newcomer to turn over 

 and think about ! The sun that shifts now north, now south 

 of him ; the seasons that go by fours instead of twos ; 

 tliG trees that blossom and bear fruit from January to 

 December, with no apparent regard for the calendar 

 months as by law established ; the black, brown, or 

 vollow people, who know not his creed or his social 

 code ; the castes and cross-divisions that puzzle and 

 surprise him; the pride and the scruples, deeper than 

 those of civilised life, but that nevertheless run counter 

 to his own ; the economic conditions that defy his pre- 

 conceptions ; the virtues and the vices that equally rub 

 him up the wrong way — all these things are highly 

 conducive to the production of that first substratum of 

 philosophic tliinking, a Socratic attitude of supreme 

 ignorance, a pure Cartesian frame of universal doubt. 



Then again there is the marvellous exuberance and 

 novelty of the fauna and flora. And this once more has 

 something better for us all than mere specialist interest. 

 Sugar and ginger grow for all alike. For we must re- 

 member that not only do the Tropics represent the vastly 

 [greater portion of the world's past : they also represent 

 I the vastly greater portion of the world's present. By 

 far the larger part of the land surface of the earth is 

 tropical or subtropical ; the temperate and arctic 

 regions make up but a minor and unimportant fraction 

 lof the soil of our planet. And if we include the sea as 

 Iwell, this truth becomes even more strikingly evident : 



