to detail at so
remote a period, I have set down aught amiss, I sincerely trust you
will be kind enough to forgive me. But this little epic of the peopling
of a single oceanic archipelago by casual strays, which I alone have
had the good fortune to follow through all its episodes, seemed to me
too unique and valuable a chapter in the annals of life to be withheld
entirely from the scientific world of your eager, ephemeral, nineteenth
century humanity.

TROPICAL EDUCATION.

If any one were to ask me (which is highly unlikely) 'In what
university would an intelligent young man do best to study?' I think I
should be very much inclined indeed to answer offhand, 'In the
Tropics.'

No doubt this advice sounds on first hearing just a trifle paradoxical;
and no doubt, too, the proposed university has certain serious
drawbacks (like many others) on the various grounds of health, expense,
faith, and morals. Senior Proctors are unknown at Honolulu; Select
Preachers don't range as far as the West Coast. But it has always
seemed to me, nevertheless, that certain elements of a liberal
education are to be acquired tropically which can never be acquired in
a temperate, still less in an arctic or antarctic academy. This is more
especially true, I allow, in the particular cases of the biologist and
the sociologist; but it is also true in a somewhat less degree of the
mere common arts course, and the mere average seeker after liberal
culture. Vast aspects of nature and human life exist which can never
adequately be understood aright except in tropical countries; vivid
side-lights are cast upon our own history and the history of our globe
which can never adequately be appreciated except beneath the searching
and all too garish rays of a tropical sun.

Whenever I meet a cultivated man who knows his Tropics--and more
particularly one who has known his Tropics during the formative period
of mental development, say from eighteen to thirty--I feel
instinctively that he possesses certain keys of man and nature, certain
clues to the problems of the world we live in, not possessed in
anything like the same degree by the mere average annual output of
Oxford or of Heidelberg. I feel that we talk like Freemasons
together--we of the Higher Brotherhood who have worshipped the sun,
_praesentiorem deum_, in his own nearer temples.

Let me begin by positing an extreme parallel. How obviously inadequate
is the conception