s this the case in
early life, when the character is still plastic and the eye still keen:
pictures are formed in that brilliant sunshine and under those dim
arches of hot grey sky that photograph themselves for ever on the
lasting tablets of the human memory. John Stuart Mill in his
Autobiography dwells lovingly, I remember, on the profound effect
produced on himself by his childish visits to Jeremy Bentham at Ford
Abbey in Dorsetshire, on the delightful sense of space and freedom and
generous expansion given to his mind by the mere act of living and
moving in those stately halls and wide airy gardens. Every university
man must look back with pleasure of somewhat the same sort to the free
breezy memories of the quadrangles and common rooms of Christ Church or
of Trinity. But in the tropical university everybody passes his time in
arcades of Greek or Pompeian airiness: the palm-trees wave and whisper
around his head as he sits for coolness on his wide verandah; the
humming-birds dart from flower to flower on the delicate bouquets that
crowd his drawing-room. I knew a lady who made a capital collection of
butterflies and moths at her own dinner-table by simply impounding in
paper boxes the insects that flitted about the lamp at dessert. Why, if
it comes to that, the very bread itself comprises generally a whole
entomological cabinet, and contains in fragments the _disjecta membra_
of specimens enough to stock entire glass cases at severe South
Kensington. How's that for an inducement to study life where it is
richest and most abundant in its native starting-place?

But above all in educational importance I rank the advantage of seeing
human nature in its primitive surroundings, far from the squalid and
chilly influences of the tail-end of the Glacial epoch. I admit at once
that cold has done much, exceeding much, for human development--has
been the mother of civilisation in somewhat the same sense that
necessity has been the mother of invention. To it, no doubt, we owe to
a great extent, in varying stages, clothing, the house, fire, the
steam-engine. Yet none the less is it true that the first levels of
society must needs have been passed under essentially tropical
conditions, and that nascent civilisation spread but slowly northward,
from Egypt and Asia, through Greece and Italy, to the cloudy regions
where its chief centres are at present domiciled under canopies of coal
smoke. And even to-day the sight of the tropics,