28 TROPICAL EDUCATION. 



seemed to me, both d priori and d posteriori, that the 

 Tropics on this account do really possess for every one 

 of us a vast and for the most part unrecognised 

 educational importance. 



I say ' for every one of us,' of deliberate design. I 

 don't mean merely for the biologist, though to him, no 

 doubt, their value in this respect is greatest of all. 

 Indeed, I doubt whether the very ideas of the struggle 

 for life, natural selection, the survival of the fittest, 

 would ever have occurred at all to the stay-at-home 

 naturalists of the Linnaean epoch. It was in the depths 

 of Brazilian forests, or under the broad shade of East 

 Indian palms, that those fertile conceptions first flashed 

 independently upon two southern explorers. It is very 

 noteworthy indeed that all the biologists who have done 

 most to revolutionise the science of life in our own day 

 Darwin, Huxley, Wallace, Bates, Fritz Miiller, and 

 Belt have without exception formed their notions 

 of the plant and animal world during tropical travels 

 in early life. No one can read the ' Voyage of the 

 Beagle,' the ' Naturalist on the Amazons,' or the ' Malay 

 Archipelago ' without feeling at every page how profoundly 

 the facts of tropical nature had penetrated and modified 

 their author's minds. On the other hand, it is well worth 

 while to notice that the formal opposition to the new and 

 more expansive evolutionary views came mainly from the 

 museum and laboratory type of naturalists in London 

 and Paris, the official exponents of dry bones, who knew 

 nature only through books and preserved specimens, or 

 through her impoverished and far less plastic develop- 

 ments in northern lands. The battle of organic evolution 



