Neotropical realm

“ Every one must have remarked how mud-banks, left by the retiring tide, imitate in miniature a country with hill and dale; and here we have the original model in rock, formed as the continent rose during the secular retirement of the ocean, instead of during the ebbing and flowing of the tides. If a shower of rain falls on the mud-bank, when left dry, it deepens the already-formed shallow lines of excavation; and so is it with the rain of successive centuries on the bank of rock and soil, which we call a continent. ”

“ But the skin of the earth is restless, as the inner fires waver in their long cooling. Beneath the volatile cloak of air, and the tidal robe of waters, the rocky layer encrusting the unknown vast core of the earth moves in its own hour. A slow adjustment, a period of planetary shudders, and a land is engulfed, a continent pressed upward. ”

“ But their succession has been broken up by frequent and violent alterations in the configuration of the globe. Land and water have changed their level,—islands have been transformed to continents,—sea-bottoms have become dry land, and dry land has sunk to form sea-bottoms,—Alps and Himalayas, Pyrenees and Apennines, Alleghanies and Rocky Mountains, have had their stormy birthdays since many of these beds have been piled one above another, and there are but few spots on the earth's surface where any number of them may be found in their original order and natural position. ”

“ Fossil remains show that regions far north, now covered with perpetual ice, once supported a luxuriant flora and fauna, and many regions in the temperate and equatorial zones that are now deserts were once overgrown with forests and teeming with animal life. The fundamental thing of the cosmos is change—birth, growth, maturity ”

“ 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. ”

“ So many of the most remarkable forms of life are now restricted to the tropics, and the relations of these to extinct types which once inhabited the temperate zones open up so many interesting questions as to the past history of the earth, that the present inquiry may be considered a necessary preliminary to a study of the problem—how to determine the climates of geologic periods from the character of their organic remains. ”

“ This primeval scene was the product of natural forces working through uncounted periods of time; the continent slowly rising and falling in the sea like the heaving breast of a world asleep; glaciers carving patiently through ages the deep estuaries; seasons innumerable clothing the hills with alternate bloom and decay. ”

“ In fine, we cannot quit the subject without being convinced that these ceaseless changes afford one of the grandest examples of that continuous series of mutations—cycle and epicycle—which has been already alluded to as a distinguishing feature in all the operations of Nature. We are accustomed to think and speak of "the everlasting hills." We look on the solid lands whereon we dwell as the emblem of all that is stable and steadfast, and on the boundless ocean as the type of all that is unsteady and changeful. ”

“ Nowhere but under the equatorial skies is it permitted to man to behold at once and in the same sweep of the eye all the stars of both the Northern and Southern heavens; and nowhere but at the tropics does nature combine to produce the various forms of vegetation that are parceled out separately to other climes. ”

“ Even now continents are being slowly depressed or upheaved, even now mountain ranges are being raised to a different level, table-lands are being formed, great valleys are being gradually scooped out; old shore-lines shift their place, old soundings vary; the sea advances in one place and retires in another; on every side nature’s plastic hand is still at work, modelling and remodelling the earth, and making it constantly a fit abode for those who dwell upon it. ”

“ But the tropics preserve for us still in all their jungles something of the tangled, thickly-peopled aspect which our planet must have presented for countless ages in all latitudes before the advent of primæval man. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Can the actual state of the earth be considered as definitive? The revolutions which have fashioned its surface, and produced the Alps in Europe, Mount Ararat in Asia, the Cordilleras in the New World—are they to be the last? In a word, will the terrestrial sphere for ever preserve the form under which we know it—as it has been, so to speak, impressed on our memories by the maps of the geographers? ”

“ This being so, it naturally results that if we want really to understand the history of life, its origin and its episodes, we must turn nowadays to that part of our planet which still most nearly preserves the original conditions—that is to say, the Tropics. ”

“ According to some cosmical law, power worked most vigorously where beauty could afterward decorate most lovingly. Here narrow upright belts of climate are substituted for the breadths of zone after zone from torrid to frozen regions. All the garden wealth of the tropics, all the domestic charm of Northern plain and field and grove, dashed with a richer splendor than their own, are here combined and grouped at the base and along the flanks of bulky ranges topped with snow and fire. ”

“ The whole continent was a garden, and from the beginning it seemed to be favored above all the other wild parks and gardens of the globe. To prepare the ground, it was rolled and sifted in seas with infinite loving deliberation and fore-thought, lifted into the light, submerged and warmed over and over again, pressed and crumpled into folds and ridges, mountains, and hills, subsoiled with heaving volcanic fires, ploughed and ground and sculptured into scenery and soil with glaciers and rivers,—every feature growing and changing from beauty to beauty, higher and higher. ”

“ In the descent of water from the clouds to the mountains, and from the mountains to the sea, they recognised the power by which valleys are carved out of the land, and by which also the materials worn from the land are carried out to the sea, there to be gathered into solid stone—the framework of new continents. ”

“ To enumerate, in the broadest way, the variety of conditions under which life exists here, one has only to enumerate creatures living in the deepest abysses of the ocean; high up on the slopes of the Himalayas; swarming in arctic seas; withstanding the hot glare of a tropical sun; living deep in the ground; breeding in the darkest caves; flourishing in desert regions; thriving in water below freezing, and again in water nearly at the boiling point. ”

“ And thus, in what may seem to us sublime antagonism, land is ever rising in the domain of ocean, and ocean ever encroaching on the regions of land. No sooner does a new island, or mountain peak, or wide area of continent, appear above the waves, than the abrading agencies are at work again. Rain, air, frost, rivers, currents, breakers, all begin anew the process of destruction, and cease not until the land has utterly disappeared, and its worn debris has sunk in mid-ocean to be in process of time once more dry land, and suffer another slow process of obliteration. ”

“ And thus the uniformitarian is led to consider the facts which geology brings to light, as indicating a slow and almost imperceptible, but, upon the whole, constant series of changes, not only in the position of the earth's materials, but in its animal and vegetable population. Land becomes sea and sea becomes land; the beds of oceans are elevated into mountain regions, carrying with them the remains of their inhabitants; sheets of lava pour from volcanic vents and overwhelm the seats of life ”

“ It is a singular and interesting thing to stand, as I do now, upon the confines of the earth, as it were, ‘at the green earth’s end,’ and gaze back through the vista of time, over Europe, and Africa, and Asia, upon the nations that have risen and flourished, and become extinct, each in its turn, like those animal races, whose story is sculptured, geologists tell us, upon the ribs and arches of the earth beneath us. ”

“ Tilted and convoluted, broken and crushed by myriad earth-movements—scarred, furrowed, worn and degraded by — 348 — the frosts, the rains, the rivers, and the seas of countless ages—the rocks of our Continent are yet eloquent of design. Where the ignorant sees nothing save confusion and discord, the thoughtful student beholds everywhere the evidence of a well-ordered evolution. ”

“ From the broad and guiding outlines of theory thus sketched we have now advanced amid ever-widening multiplicity of detail into a fuller and nobler conception of the origin of scenery. The law of evolution is written as legibly on the landscapes of the earth as on any other page of the Book of Nature. Not only do we recognise that the existing topography of the continents, instead of being primeval in origin, has gradually been developed after many precedent mutations, but we are enabled to trace these earlier revolutions in the structure of every hill and glen. ”

“ Every rock beneath our feet has its story of change to tell us. Mountains, valleys, and plains, continents and islands, have passed through vicissitudes innumerable, and bear within them the evidence of a gradual development or evolution. Looking back through the vista of the past one sees the dry lands gradually separating from the ocean, and gathering together into continental masses according to a definite plan. It is this slow growth, this august evolution, carried on through countless æons, which most impresses the student of physical geology. ”

“ The great changes in nations, like the geological changes of the earth, are slowly and continuously wrought. The waters, falling from Heaven as rain and dews, slowly disintegrate the granite mountains; abrade the plains, leaving hills and ridges of denudation as their monuments ”

“ Virgin fields of discovery still invite scientific exploration, and the green sepulchre of Equatorial vegetation retains innumerable secrets of Art and architecture. The geological mysteries of these volcanic shores offer a host of unsolved problems, the surpassing magnificence of flower and foliage makes every island a botanical Paradise, and the varieties of race and language which moulded and coloured the destinies of the Equatorial world, supply historian and philologist with opportunities of unlimited research. ”

“ The volcanic fires of a past age, and the scorching heat of a tropical sun, have in most places rendered the soil unfit for vegetation. The country rises in successive steps of table-land, interspersed with some truncate conical hills, and the horizon is bounded by an irregular chain of more lofty mountains. The scene, as beheld through the hazy atmosphere of this climate, is one of great interest; if, indeed, a person, fresh from sea, and who has just walked, for the first time, in a grove of cocoa-nut trees, can be a judge of anything but his own happiness. ”

“ And fully to understand this pregnant educational importance of the Tropics we must consider with ourselves how large a part tropical conditions have borne in the development of life in general, and of human life and society in particular.
The Tropics, we must carefully remember, are the norma of nature: the way things mostly are and always have been. They represent to us the common condition of the whole world during by far the greater part of its entire existence. ”

“ All that intelligent women and children desire to know about the tropics will be found here—the aspects of nature, the rivers and coasts, the great sandy deserts, the gigantic vegetation, and the animal denizens from insects to apes ”

“ Thus while the ocean prepares the materials for the future continents in its bosom, it also furnishes the waters which wash away the lands already existing. To the thought of modern science the granite peaks, the snow-clad mountains, immovable and eternal as they seem, are constantly disintegrating, and partake, with every thing else in creation, the eternal round of change which is constantly going on. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It is enough, from our present point of view, to be assured that the main features of the country were chalked out, as it were, at a very distant geological period, and that all the infinite variety in the relief of our land has been brought about directly, not by titanic convulsions and earth-movements, but by the long-continued working of rain and rivers—of frost and snow and ice, supplemented from time to time by the action of the sea. ”

“ The Sea with its white teeth bites the edges of the continents into new shapes, as a child bites the edges of a biscuit. The glaciers file away the mountains into valleys and plains. Beneath the ocean busy insects are building [Pg 22] the foundations of new continents and, under the earth, Fiery Demons are ready at all times to burst forth and help to destroy the old ones. ”