four-hundred-fold? How can Mrs. Grundy thrive where every woman may
rear her own ten children on her ten-rood plot without aid or
assistance from their indeterminate fathers? What need of carpentry
where a few bamboos, cut down at random, can be fastened together with
thongs into a comfortable chair? What use of pottery where calabashes
hang on every tree, and cocoa-nuts, with the water fresh and pure
within, supply at once the cup, and the filter, and the Apollinaris
within?

Of course I don't mean to assert, either, that this tropical university
will in itself suffice for all the needs of educated or rather of
educable men. It must be taken, _bien entendu_, as a supplementary
course to the Literæ Humaniores. There are things which can only be
learnt in the crowded haunts and cities of men--in London, Paris, New
York, Vienna. There are things which can only be learnt in the centres
of culture or of artistic handicraft--in Oxford, Munich, Florence,
Venice, Rome. There is only one Grand Canal and only one Pitti Palace.
We must have Shakespeare, Homer, Catullus, Dante; we must have Phidias,
Fra Angelico, Rafael, Mendelssohn; we must have Aristotle, Newton,
Laplace, Spencer. But after all these, and before all these, there is
something more left to learn. Having first read them, we must read
ourselves out of them. We must forget all this formal modern life; we
must break away from this cramped, cold, northern world; we must find
ourselves face to face at last, in Pacific isles or African forests,
with the underlying truths of simple naked nature. For that, in its
perfection, we must go to the Tropics; and there, we shall learn and
unlearn much, coming back, no doubt, with shattered faiths and broken
gods, and strangely disconcerted European prejudices, but looking out
upon life with a new outlook, an outlook undimmed by ten thousand
preconceptions which hem in the vision and obstruct the view of the