civilised life, but that nevertheless run counter to his own; the
economic conditions that defy his preconceptions; the virtues and the
vices that equally rub him up the wrong way--all these things are
highly conducive to the production of that first substratum of
philosophic thinking, a Socratic attitude of supreme ignorance, a pure
Cartesian frame of universal doubt.

Then again there is the marvellous exuberance and novelty of the fauna
and flora. And this once more has something better for us all than mere
specialist interest. Sugar and ginger grow for all alike. For we must
remember that not only do the Tropics represent the vastly greater
portion of the world's past: they also represent the vastly greater
portion of the world's present. By far the larger part of the land
surface of the earth is tropical or subtropical; the temperate and
arctic regions make up but a minor and unimportant fraction of the soil
of our planet. And if we include the sea as well, this truth becomes
even more strikingly evident: the Tropics are even now the rule of
life; the colder regions are but an abnormal and outlying eccentricity
of nature. Yet it is from this starved and dwarfed and impoverished
northern area that most of us have formed our views of life, to the
total exclusion of the wider, richer, more varied world that calls for
our admiration in tropical latitudes.

Insensibly this richness and vividness of nature all around one, on a
first visit to the Tropics, sinks into one's mind, and produces
profound, though at first unconscious, modifications in one's whole
mode of regarding man and his universe. Especially is this the case in
early life, when the character is still plastic and the eye still keen:
pictures are formed in that brilliant sunshine and under those dim
arches of hot grey sky that photograph themselves for ever on the