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
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 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
lasting tablets of the human memory. John Stuart Mill in his
Autobiography dwells lovingly, I remember, on the profound effect
produced on himself by his childish visits to Jeremy Bentham at Ford
Abbey in Dorsetshire, on the delightful sense of space and freedom and
generous expansion given to his mind by the mere act of living and
moving in those stately halls and wide airy gardens. Every university
man must look back with pleasure of somewhat the same sort to the free
breezy memories of the quadrangles and common rooms of Christ Church or
of Trinity. But in the tropical university everybody passes his time in
arcades of Greek or Pompeian airiness: the palm-trees wave and whisper
around his head as he sits for coolness on his wide verandah; the
humming-birds dart from flower to flower on the delicate bouquets that
crowd his drawing-room. I knew a lady who made a capital collection of
butterflies and moths at her own dinner-table by simply impounding in
paper boxes the insects that flitted about the lamp at dessert. Why, if
it comes to that, the very bread itself comprises generally a whole
entomological cabinet, and contains in fragments the _disjecta membra_
of specimens enough to stock entire glass cases at severe South
Kensington. How's that for an inducement to study life where it is
richest and most abundant in its native starting-place?
But above all in educational importance I rank the advantage of seeing
human nature in its primitive surroundings, far from the squalid and
chilly influences of the tail-end of the Glacial epoch. I admit at once
that cold has done much, exceeding much, for human development--has
been the mother of civilisation in somewhat the same sense that
necessity has been the mother of invention. To it, no doubt, we owe to
a great extent, in varying stages, clothing, the house, fire, the
steam-engine. Yet none the less is it true that the first levels of
society must needs have been passed under essentially tropical
conditions, and that nascent civilisation spread but slowly northward,
from Egypt and Asia, through Greece and Italy, to the cloudy regions
where its chief centres are at present domiciled under canopies of coal
smoke. And even to-day the sight of the tropics, green and luxuriant,
brings us into touch at once with earlier ideas and habits of the
race--makes us more able not only to understand, but also to sympathise
with, our ancient ancestors of the naked-and-not-ashamed era of
culture. Views formed exclusively in the North tend too much to imitate
the reduced gentlewoman's outlook upon life; views formed in the
Tropics correct this refractive influence by a certain genial and
tolerant virile expansion, not to be learned at the Common, Clapham.
To one whose economic pendulum has hitherto oscillated between selfish
luxury in Mayfair and squalid poverty in Seven Dials, there is indeed a
world of novelty in the first view of the tropical poverty that is not
squalid but contentedly luxurious--of the dusky father with his wife or
wives (the mere number is a detail) sprawling at full length, half
clad, in the eye of the sun, before the palm-thatched hut, while the
fat black babies and the fat black little pigs wallow together almost
indistinguishably in the dust at his side, just out of reach of the
muscular foot that might otherwise of pure wantonness molest them. What
a flood of light it all casts upon the future possibilities of society,
that leisured, cultureless household, on whose garden-plot yam or
bread-fruit or bananas or sweet potatoes can be grown in sufficient
quantity to support the family without more labour than in England
would pay for its kitchen coals; where the hut is but a shelter from
rain, or a bed-curtain for night, and where the untaxed sun supplies
the place of a drawing-room fire all the year round, and warms the
water for the baby's bath at nothing the gallon! If there is any man
who doesn't sympathise with his dusky brother when he sees him thus at
home in his airy palace--any man who doesn't fraternise closely with
his kind when thus brought face to face with our primitive existence, I
don't envy him his stern and wild Caledonian ethics. The beach-comber
instinct should be strong in all sane minds. Or if that blunt way of
putting it perchance offend the weaker brethren, let us say rather, the
spirit of the Lotus-eaters. For the man who doesn't want to eat of the
Lotus just once in his life has become too civilised: the iron of the
Gradgrind era of universal competition and payment by results has
entered to deeply into his sordid soul. He wants a course of Egypt and
Tahiti.
Oh, yes; I know what you are going to object, and I grant it at once:
the influence of the Tropics is by no means an ascetic one. They, tend
rather to encourage a certain genial and friendly tolerance of all
possible human forms of society--even the lowest. They are essentially
democratic, not to say socialistic and revolutionary in tone. By
bringing us all down to the underlying verities of life, apart from its
conventions, they beget perhaps a somewhat hasty impatience of Court
dress and the Lord Chamberlain's regulations. But, _per contra_, they
teach us to feel that every man, whether black, brown, or white, is
very human, and every woman and child, if possible, even a trifle more
so. Wicked as it all is, there is yet in tropical political economy
more of the Gospel according to St. John, and less of Adam Smith,
Ricardo, and Malthus, than in any orthodox political economy prescribed
by examiners for the University of London. It is something to see a
world where ceaseless toil is not the necessary and inevitable lot of
all who don't pay income tax on a thousand a year, even if Board
schools are unknown and quadratic equations a vanishing quantity. It is
something to see a stick of sugar-cane protruding from the mouth of
every child, and oranges retailed at twelve for a ha'penny. It is
something to know how the vast majority of the human race still live
and move and have their being, and to feel that after all their mode of
life, though lacking in Greek iambics, wallpapers, and the _Saturday
Review_, yet appeals in its own beach-comberish way to some of one's
inmost and deepest yearnings. The hibiscus that flames before the
wattled hut, the parrot that chatters from the green and golden
mango-tree, the lithe, healthy figures of the children in the stream,
are some compensation for the lack of London mud, London fog, and
London illustrations of practical Christianity in the Isle of Dogs and
the Bermondsey purlieus. I don't know whether I am knocking the last
nail into the completed coffin of my own contention, but I believe
every right-minded man returns from the Tropics a good deal more of a
Communist than when he went there.
One word of explanation to prevent mistake. I am not myself, like
Kingsley or Wallace, an enthusiastic tropicist. On the contrary, viewed
as a place of permanent residence, I don't at all like the Tropics to
live in. I am pleading here only for their educational value, in small
doses. Spending two or three years there in the heyday of life is very
much like reading Herodotus--a thing one is glad one had once to do,
but one would never willingly do again for any money. We northern
creatures are remote products of the Great Ice Age, and by this time,
like Polar bears, we have grown adapted to our glacial environment. All
the more, therefore, is it a useful shaking-up for us to get
transported bodily from our cramped and poverty-stricken northern
slums, just once in our life, to the palms and temples of the South,
the lands where the human body is a hardy plant, not a frail exotic. We
come back to our chilly home among the fogs and bogs with wider
projects for the thawing down of the social ice-heap, and the
introduction of the bread-fruit-tree and the currant-bun-bush into the
remotest wilds of the borough of Hackney. I am not even quite sure that
tropical experience doesn't predispose us somewhat in favour of
planting the sweet potato instead of grazing battering-rams in the
uplands of Connemara. But hush; I hear an editorial frown. No more of
this heresy.
ON THE WINGS OF THE WIND.
Of course, you know my friend the squirting cucumber. If you don't,
that can be only because you've never looked in the right place to find
him. On all waste ground outside most southern cities--Nice, Cannes,
Florence: Rome, Algiers, Granada: Athens, Palermo, Tunis, where you
will--the soil is thickly covered by dark trailing vines which bear on
their branches a queer hairy green fruit, much like a common cucumber
at that early stage of its existence when we know it best in the
commercial form of pickled gherkins. As long as you don't interfere
with them, these hairy green fruits do nothing out of the common in the
way of personal aggressiveness. Like the model young lady of the books
on etiquette, they don't speak unless they're spoken to. But if
peradventure you chance to brush up against the plant accidentally, or
you irritate it of set purpose with your foot or your cane, then, as
Mr. Rider Haggard would say, 'a strange thing happens': off jumps the
little green fruit with a startling bounce, and scatters its juice and
pulp and seeds explosively through a hole in the end where the stem
joined on to it. The entire central part of the cucumber, in short
(answering to the seeds and pulp of a ripe melon), squirts out
elastically through the breach in the outer wall, leaving the hollow
shell behind as a mere empty windbag.
Naturally, the squirting cucumber knows its own business best, and is
not without sufficient reasons of its own for this strange and, to some
extent, unmannerly behaviour. By its queer trick of squirting, it
manages to kill at least two birds with one stone. For, in the first
place, the sudden elastic jump of the fruit frightens away browsing
animals, such as goats and cattle. Those meditative ruminants are
little accustomed to finding shrubs or plants take the aggressive
against them; and when they see a fruit that quite literally flies in
their faces of its own accord, they hesitate to attack the uncanny vine
which bristles with such magical and almost miraculous defences.
Moreover, the juice of the squirting cucumber is bitter and nauseous,
and if it gets into the eyes or nostrils of man or beast, it impresses
itself on the memory by stinging like red pepper. So the trick of
squirting serves in a double way as a protection to the plant against
the attacks of herbivorous animals and other enemies.
But that's not all. Even when no enemy is near, the ripe fruits at last
drop off of themselves, and scatter their seeds elastically in every
direction. This they do simply in order to disseminate their kind in
new and unoccupied spots, where the seedlings will root and find an
opening in life for themselves. Observe, indeed, that the very word
'disseminate' implies a general vague recognition of this principle of
plant-life on the part of humanity. It means, etymologically, to
scatter seed; and it points to the fact that everywhere in nature seeds
are scattered broadcast, infinite pains being taken by the mother-plant
for their general diffusion over wide areas of woodland, plain, or
prairie.
Let us take as examples a single little set of instances, familiar to
everybody, but far commoner in the world at large than the inhabitants
of towns are at all aware of: I mean, the winged seeds, that fly about
freely in the air by means of feathery hairs or gossamer, like
thistle-down and dandelion. Of these winged types we have many hundred
varieties in England alone. All the willow-herbs, for example, have
such feathery seeds (or rather fruits) to help them on their way
through life; and one kind, the beautiful pink rose-bay, flies about so
readily, and over such wide spaces of open country, that the plant is
known to farmers in America as fireweed, because it always springs up
at once over whole square miles of charred and smoking soil after every
devastating forest fire. It travels fast, for it travels like Ariel. In
much the same way, the coltsfoot grows on all new English railway
banks, because its winged seeds are wafted everywhere in myriads on the
winds of March. All the willows and poplars have also winged seeds: so
have the whole vast tribe of hawkweeds, groundsels, ragworts, thistles,
fleabanes, cat's-ears, dandelions, and lettuces. Indeed, one may say
roughly, there are very few plants of any size or importance in the
economy of nature which don't deliberately provide, in one way or
another, for the dispersal and dissemination of their fruits or
seedlings.
Why is this? Why isn't the plant content just to let its grains or
berries drop quietly on to the soil beneath, and there shift for
themselves as best they may on their own resources?
The answer is a more profound one than you would at first imagine.
Plants discovered the grand principle of the rotation of crops long
before man did. The farmer now knows that if he sows wheat or turnips
too many years running on the same plot, he 'exhausts the soil,' as we
say--deprives it of certain special mineral or animal constituents
needful for that particular crop, and makes the growth of the plant,
therefore, feeble or even impossible. To avoid this misfortune, he lets
the land lie fallow, or varies his crops from year to year according to
a regular and deliberate cycle. Well, natural selection forced the same
discovery upon the plants themselves long before the farmer had dreamed
of its existence. For plants, being, in the strictest sense, 'rooted to
the spot,' absolutely require that all their needs should be supplied
quite locally. Hence, from the very beginning, those plants which
scattered their seeds widest throve the best; while those which merely
dropped them on the ground under their own shadow, and on soil
exhausted by their own previous demands upon it, fared ill in the
struggle for life against their more discursive competitors. The result
has been that in the long run few species have survived, except those
which in one way or another arranged beforehand for the dispersal of
their seeds and fruits over fresh and unoccupied areas of plain or
hillside.