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,
_præsentiorem deum_, in his own nearer temples.

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