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 planet 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 necessarily 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 poverty, discomfort, and squalor. For green
fields he has snow and reindeer moss: for singing birds and flowers,
the ptarmigan and the tundra. How can he ever form any fitting
conception of the glory of life--of the means by which animal and
vegetable organisms first grew and flourished? How can he frame to
himself any reasonable picture of civilised society, or of the origin
and development of human faculty and human organisation?

Somewhat the same, though of course in a highly mitigated degree, are
the disadvantages under which the pure temperate education labours,
when compared with the education unconsciously drunk in at every pore
by an intelligent mind in tropical climates. And fully to understand
this pregnant educational importance of the Tropics we must consider
with ourselves how large a part tropical conditions have borne in the
development of life in general, and of human life and society in
particular.

The Tropics, we must carefully remember, are the norma of nature: the
way things mostly are and always have been. They represent to us the
common condition of the whole world during by far the greater part of
its entire existence. Not only are they still in the strictest sense
the biological head-quarters: they are also the standard or central
type by which we must explain all the rest of nature, both in man and
beast, in plant and animal.

The temperate and arctic worlds, on the other hand, are a mere passing
accident in the history of our planet: a hole-and-corner development; a
special result of the great Glacial epoch, and of that vast slow
secular cooling which preceded and led u