The Malay archipelago : the land of the orang-utan ... - Wallace Online

IXXXIII.] ARU ISLANDS.—PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY. 375step. In the regions of the equator, on the other hand, whetherit be forest or savannah, a sombre green clotlies universal nature.You may journey for hours, and even for days, and meet withnothing to break the monotony. Flovrers are everywhere rare,and anything at all striking is only to be met with at verydistant intervals.The idea that nature exhibits gay colours in the tropics, andthat the general aspect of nature is there more bright and variedin hue than with us, has even been made the foundation oftheories of art, and we have been forbidden to use brightcolours in our garments, and in the decorations of our dwellings,because it was supposed that we should be thereby actingin opposition to the teachings of nature. The argument itselfis a very poor one, since it might with equal justice be maintained,that as we possess faculties for the ajDpreciation ofcolours, we should make up for the deficiencies of nature anduse the gayest tints in those regions where the landscajoe ismost monotonous. But the assumption on which the argumentis founded is totally false, so that even if the reasoning werevalid, we need not be afraid of outraging nature by decoratingour houses and our persons with all those gay hues which areso lavishly spread over our fields and mountains, our hedges,woods, and meadows.It is very easy to see what has led to this erroneous vieAv ofthe nature of troj^ical vegetation. In our hothouses and at ourflower-shows we gather together the finest flowering i^lants fromthe most distant regions of the earth, and exhibit them in aproximity to each other which never occurs in nature. Ahundred distinct plants, all with bright, or strange, or gorgeousflowers, make a wondei'ful show wlien brought together ; butl^ej-haps no two of these plants could ever be seen together in astate of nature, each inhabiting a distant region, or a differentstation. Again, all moderately warm extra-European countriesare mixed u^d with the tropics in general estimation, and a vagueidea is formed that whatever is pre-eminently beautiful mustcome from the hottest parts of the earth. But the fact is quitethe contrary. Rhododendrons and azaleas ai'e jjlants of temperateregions, the grandest lilies are from temperate Japan,and a large proportion of our most showy flowering plants arenatives of the Himalayas, of the Cape, of the United States, ofChili, or of China and Japan, all temjDerate regions. True, thereare a great number of grand and gorgeous flowers in tlie tropics,but the proportion they bear to the mass of the vegetation isexceedingly small ; so that what appears an anomaly is nevertlielessa fact, and the efl'ect of flowers on the general aspect ofnature is far less in the equatorial than in the temperate regionsof the earth.