however, is neither here nor there. The fact remains that we of
Northern Europe live to-day in a cramped, chilled, contracted world; a
world from which all the larger, fiercer, and grander types have either
been killed off or driven south; a world which stands to the full and
vigorous world of the Eocene and Miocene periods in somewhat the same
relation as Lapland stands to-day to Italy or the Riviera.

This being so, it naturally results that if we want really to
understand the history of life, its origin and its episodes, we must
turn nowadays to that part of our planet which still most nearly
preserves the original conditions--that is to say, the Tropics. And it
has always seemed to me, both _à priori_ and _à posteriori_, that the
Tropics on this account do really possess for every one of us a vast
and for the most part unrecognised educational importance.

I say 'for every one of us,' of deliberate design. I don't mean merely
for the biologist, though to him, no doubt, their value in this respect
is greatest of all. Indeed, I doubt whether the very ideas of the
struggle for life, natural selection, the survival of the fittest,
would ever have occurred at all to the stay-at-home naturalists of the
Linnæan epoch. It was in the depths of Brazilian forests, or under the
broad shade of East Indian palms, that those fertile conceptions first
flashed independently upon two southern explorers. It is very
noteworthy indeed that all the biologists who have done most to
revolutionise the science of life in our own day--Darwin, Huxley,
Wallace, Bates, Fritz Müller, 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