mere temperately educated.

Nor is it only on the _élite_ of the world that this tropical training
has in its own way a widening influence. It is good, of course, for our
Galtons to have seen South Africa; good for our Tylors to have studied
Mexico; good for our Hookers to have numbered the rhododendrons and
deodars of the Himalayas. I sometimes fancy, even, that in the works of
our very greatest stay-at-home thinkers on anthropological or
sociological subjects, I detect here and there a certain formalist and
schematic note which betrays the want of first-hand acquaintance with
the plastic and expansive nature of tropical society. The beliefs and
relations of the actual savage have not quite that definiteness of form
and expression which our University Professors would fain assign to
them. But apart from the widening influence of the Tropics on these
picked minds, there is a widening influence exerted insensibly on the
very planters or merchants, the rank and file of European settlers,
which can hardly fail to impress all those who have lived amongst them.
The cramping effect of the winter cold and the artificial life is all
removed. Men live in a freer, wider, warmer air; their doors and
windows stand open day and night; the scent of flowers and the hum of
insects blow in upon them with every breeze; their brother man and
sister woman are more patent in every action to their eyes; the world
shows itself more frankly; it has fewer secrets, and readier
sympathies. I don't mean to say the result is all gain. Far from it.
There are evils inherent in tropical life which, as a noble lord
remarks of nature generally, "no preacher can heal." But viewed as
education, like Saint-Simon's thieving, it is all valuable. I should
think most men who have once passed through a tropical experience would
no more wish that full chapter blotted out of their lives than they
would consent to lose their university culture, their Continental