Science in Arcady - Allen Grant

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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 penetrated and modified their authors' minds. On the other hand, it is well worth while to notice that the formal opposition to the new and more expansive evolutionary views came mainly from the museum and laboratory type of naturalists in London and Paris, the official exponents of dry bones, who knew nature only through books and preserved specimens, or through her impoverished and far less plastic developments in northern lands. The battle of organic evolution has been waged by the Darwins, the Huxleys, and the Müllers on the one hand, against the Cuviers, the Owens, and the Virchows on the other.

      Still, it is not only in biology, as I said just now, that a taste of the Tropics in early life exerts a marked widening and philosophic influence upon a man's whole mental horizon. In ten thousand ways, in that great tropical university, men feel themselves in closer touch than elsewhere with the ultimate facts and truths of nature. I don't know whether it is all fancy and preconceived opinion, but I often imagine when I talk with new-met men that I can detect a certain difference in tone and feeling at first sight between those who have and those who have not passed the Tropical Tripos. In the Tropics, in short, we seem to get down to the very roots of things. Thousands of questions, social, political, economical, ethical, present themselves at once in new and more engagingly simple aspects. Difficulties vanish, distinctions disappear, conventions fade, clothes are reduced to their least common measure, man stands forth in his native nakedness. Things that in the North we had come to regard as inevitable—garments, firing, income tax, morality—evaporate or simplify themselves with instructive ease and phantasmagoric readiness. Malthus and the food question assume fresh forms, as in dissolving views, before our very eyes. How are slums conceivable or East Ends possible where every man can plant his own yam and cocoa-nut, and reap their fruit 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 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 travel, or their literary, scientific, or artistic education.

      And what are the elements of this tropical curriculum which give it such immense educational value? I think they are manifold. A few only may be selected as of typical importance.

      In the first place, because first in order of realisation, there is its value as a mental bouleversement, a revolution in ideas, a sort of moral and intellectual cold shower-bath, a nervous shock to the system generally. The patient or pupil gets so thoroughly upset in all his preconceived ideas; he finds all round him a life so different from the life to which he has been accustomed in colder regions, that he wakes up suddenly, rubs his eyes hard, and begins to look about him for some general explanation of the world he lives in. It is good for the ordinary man to get thus unceremoniously upset. Take the average young intelligence of the London streets, with its glib ideas already formed from supply and demand in a civilised country, where soil is appropriated, and classes distinct, and commodities drop as it were from the clouds upon the middle-class breakfast-table—take such an intelligence, self-satisfied and empty, and place its possessor all at once in a new environment, where everything material, mental, and moral seems topsy-turvy, where life is real and morals are rudimentary—and unless he is a very particular fool indeed, what a lot you must really give that blithe new-comer to turn over and think about! The sun that shifts now north, now south of him; the seasons that go by fours instead of twos; the trees that blossom and bear fruit from January to December, with no apparent regard for the calendar months as by law established; the black, brown, or yellow people, who know not his creed or his social code; the castes and cross-divisions that puzzle and surprise him; the pride and the scruples, deeper than those of 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

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