Neotropical

“ Even in Guatemala and Mexico we have howling and spider-monkeys, coati-mundis, tapirs, and armadillos; while chatterers, manakins, ant-thrushes, and other peculiarly Neotropical groups of birds are abundant. There is therefore no doubt as to Mexico forming part of this region, although it is comparatively poor, and exhibits the intermingling of temperate and tropical forms.
The West Indies are less clearly Neotropical, their poverty in mammals as well as in most other groups being extreme, while great numbers of North American birds migrate there in winter. ”

“ The great mass of Neotropical butterflies are forest species, and have been developed for countless ages in a forest-clad tropical country. The north temperate butterflies, on the other hand, are very largely open-country species, frequenting pastures, mountains, and open plains, and often wandering over an extensive area. These would find, on the higher slopes of mountains, a vegetation and conditions suited to them, and would occupy such stations in less time than would be required to adapt and modify the forest-haunting groups of the American lowlands. ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ I see great waters, and my gaze beholds a sandy wilderness above which a red moon rises. Against a rocky shore a wave mournfully breaks and a mighty girdle of clouds drifts above the new continent. In the clouds a white bird soars and utters a piercing cry. The south wind and the east have clashed, and the first rain has gathered above the new continent. You must think of yourself. Sit down yonder on that promontory. From the new continent gaze out at the five old continents; they are five stars and in their midst the sixth one, the most beautiful of them, with its dark lustre. ”

“ Such are the elements of the scenery, but it is a hopeless attempt to paint the general effect. Learned naturalists describe these scenes of the tropics by naming a multitude of objects, and mentioning some characteristic feature of each. To a learned traveller this possibly may communicate some definite ideas: but who else from seeing a plant in an herbarium can imagine its appearance when growing in its native soil? Who from seeing choice plants in a hothouse, can magnify some into the dimensions of forest trees, and crowd others into an entangled jungle? ”

“ 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. ”

“ I need not here refer to the events of the voyage—where we went and what we did—as I have given a sufficiently full account in my published Journal. The glories of the vegetation of the Tropics rise before my mind at the present time more vividly than anything else; though the sense of sublimity, which the great deserts of Patagonia and the forest-clad mountains of Tierra del Fuego excited in me, has left an indelible impression on my mind. The sight of a naked savage in his native land is an event which can never be forgotten. ”

“ 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. ”

“ So thin the land is that from the little steamer's deck, as from a great altitude, the eye can range over immense distances. These are the skirts of the continent, trending in multitudinous tatters southward to the sea;—and the practiced gaze of the geologist can discern the history of prodigious alluvial formation, the slow creation of future prairie lands, in those long grassy tongues,—those desolate islands, shaped like the letters of an Oriental alphabet,—those reaches of flesh-colored sand, that shift their shape with the years, but never cease to grow. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ To see how, following a definite plan, the vast continents have grown to their present size and form; to see how animal and vegetable life have evolved successively higher and higher forms; to see where in this wondrous drama of creation, this strange unfolding of life, the first faint, indecisive traces of man’s presence are to be found; to learn what great changes in climate, in Geogony, and in life, had occurred before man’s appearance, let us pass in brief review the history of early geological periods. ”

“ If I have come to a different conclusion, it is not that I am incapable of appreciating the splendours of tropical scenery, but because I believe that they are not of the kind usually represented, and that the scenery of our own land is, of its own kind, unsurpassed: there is nothing approaching it in the tropics, nor is the scenery of the tropics to be found with us. ”

“ 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. ”

“ To us north and south, east and west are of equal interest and importance. Our desire now is to understand, if haply we may, the complex system of which we ourselves form a part. The distribution of land and water—the configuration of continental areas and oceanic basins—the circulation of oceanic and terrestrial waters—earth-movements and volcanoes—ice-formations—the atmosphere—climatology—the geographical distribution of plants and animals—in a word, the world as one organic whole now forms the subject of our contemplation. ”

“ In a general survey of the earth, we may therefore look upon the New World as pre-eminently the land of forests, contrasting strongly with the Old, where steppes and deserts are the most characteristic features. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The sun had come out, the air was clear and fresh, and though the land was as unmitigated a bit of desert as I had ever seen, with only a few stunted, prickly, and woody stemmed plants supporting a feeble life in the hollows of the ground, still it was exhilarating to tread at last the soil of a new continent and receive a new impression. ”

“ If man’s first appearance was in a geological period when the distribution of land and sea and the climates of the earth were not as now, then on both sides of the globe, outside the present tropical zones, there were regions whose warmth and luxuriant vegetation would have favoured man’s life with least need of civilized arts, and whence successive waves of population may have spread over cooler climates. ”

“ The equatorial regions are then, as regards their past and present life history, a more ancient world than that represented by the temperate zones, a world in which the laws which have governed the progressive development of life have operated with comparatively little check for countless ages, and have resulted in those infinitely varied and beautiful forms—those wonderful eccentricities of structure, of function, and of instinct—that rich variety of colour, and that nicely balanced harmony of relations—which delight and astonish us in the animal productions of all tropical countries. ”

“ This idea of the gradual formation and improvement of the animal world accords with the observations of some modern philosophers, who have supposed that the continent of America has been raised out of the ocean at a later period of time than the other three quarters of the globe, which they deduce from the greater comparative heights of its mountains, and the consequent greater coldness of its respective climates, and from the less size and strength of its animals, as the tygers and allegators compared with those of Asia or Africa. ”

“ And now we near the vast Carboniferous continent, and see along the undulating outline, between us and the sky, the strange forms of a vegetation, compared with which that of every previously seen land seems stunted and poor. ”

“ We are, therefore, face to face with an ordered series of almost boundless ages, geologic epochs of human history succeeding each other in majestic procession, as the face of our island was now tropical, now arctic; as the seas swelled up and covered the hills, or the bottom of the deep drove back the ocean and became dry land, an unbroken continent. ”

“ We are thus enabled to trace the history of lakes and rivers, of forests and mosses: we can follow the succession of animals that have wandered over the land, and many of which had died out ere the days of history began: we can dimly perceive the conditions of life amidst the earliest human population of the country: we can recover abundant evidence of the extraordinary vicissitudes of climate which, since these ancient times, have affected not this land only, but the whole northern hemisphere. ”