ed that all the biologists who have done most to
revolutionise the science of life in our own day--Darwin, Huxley,
Wallace, Bates, Fritz Mueller, 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 authors' 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
developments in northern lands. The battle of organic evolution has
been waged by the Darwins, the Huxleys, and the Muellers on the one
hand, against the Cuviers, the Owens, and the Virchows on the other.

Still, it is not only in biology, as I said just now, that a taste of
the Tropics in early life exerts a marked widening and philosophic
influence upon a man's whole mental horizon. In ten thousand ways, in
that great tropical university, men feel themselves in closer touch
than elsewhere with the ultimate facts and truths of nature. I don't
know whether it is all fancy and preconceived opinion, but I often
imagine when I talk with new-met men that I can detect a certain
difference in tone and feeling at first sight between those who have
and those who have not passed the Tropical Tripos. In the Tropics, in
short, we seem to get down to the very roots of things. Thousands of
questions, social, political, economical, ethical, present themselves
at once in new and more engagingly simple aspects. Difficulties vanish,
distinctions disappear, conventions fade, clothes are reduced to their
least common measure, man stands forth in his native nakedness. Things
that in the North we had come to regard as inevitable--garments,
firing, income tax, morality--evaporate or simplify themselves with
instructive ease and phantasmagoric readiness. Malthus and the food
question assume fresh forms, as in dissolving views, before our very
eyes. How are slums conceivable or East Ends possible where every man
can plant his own yam and cocoa-nut, and reap their fruit
four-hundred-fold? How can Mrs. Gr