nd acquaintance with
the plastic and expansive nature of tropical society. The beliefs and
relations of the actual savage have not quite that definiteness of form
and expression which our University Professors would fain assign to
them. But apart from the widening influence of the Tropics on these
picked minds, there is a widening influence exerted insensibly on the
very planters or merchants, the rank and file of European settlers,
which can hardly fail to impress all those who have lived amongst them.
The cramping effect of the winter cold and the artificial life is all
removed. Men live in a freer, wider, warmer air; their doors and
windows stand open day and night; the scent of flowers and the hum of
insects blow in upon them with every breeze; their brother man and
sister woman are more patent in every action to their eyes; the world
shows itself more frankly; it has fewer secrets, and readier
sympathies. I don't mean to say the result is all gain. Far from it.
There are evils inherent in tropical life which, as a noble lord
remarks of nature generally, "no preacher can heal." But viewed as
education, like Saint-Simon's thieving, it is all valuable. I should
think most men who have once passed through a tropical experience would
no more wish that full chapter blotted out of their lives than they
would consent to lose their university culture, their Continental
travel, or their literary, scientific, or artistic education.

And what are the elements of this tropical curriculum which give it
such immense educational value? I think they are manifold. A few only
may be selected as of typical importance.

In the first place, because first in order of realisation, there is its
value as a mental _bouleversement_, a revolution in ideas, a sort of
moral and intellectual cold shower-bath, a nervous shock to the system
generally. The patient or pupil gets so thoroughly upset in all his
preconceived ideas; he finds all round him a life so different from the
life to which he has been accustomed in colder regions, that he wakes
up suddenly, rubs his eyes hard, and begins to look about him for some
general explanation of the world he lives in. It is good for the
ordinary man to get thus unceremoniously upset. Take the average young
intelligence of the London streets, with its glib ideas already formed
from supply and demand in a civilised country, where soil is
appropriated, and classes distinct, and commodities drop as it were