vegetable organisms first grew and flourished? How can he frame to
himself any reasonable picture of civilised society, or of the origin
and development of human faculty and human organisation?

Somewhat the same, though of course in a highly mitigated degree, are
the disadvantages under which the pure temperate education labours,
when compared with the education unconsciously drunk in at every pore
by an intelligent mind in tropical climates. And fully to understand
this pregnant educational importance of the Tropics we must consider
with ourselves how large a part tropical conditions have borne in the
development of life in general, and of human life and society in
particular.

The Tropics, we must carefully remember, are the norma of nature: the
way things mostly are and always have been. They represent to us the
common condition of the whole world during by far the greater part of
its entire existence. Not only are they still in the strictest sense
the biological head-quarters: they are also the standard or central
type by which we must explain all the rest of nature, both in man and
beast, in plant and animal.

The temperate and arctic worlds, on the other hand, are a mere passing
accident in the history of our planet: a hole-and-corner development; a
special result of the great Glacial epoch, and of that vast slow
secular cooling which preceded and led up to it, from the beginning of
the Miocene or Mid-Tertiary period. Our European ideas, poor, harsh,
and narrow, are mainly formed among a chilled and stunted fauna and
flora, under inclement skies, and in gloomy days, all of which can give
us but a very cramped and faint conception of the joyous exuberance,
the teeming vitality, the fierce hand-to-hand conflict, and the