The Great Tropical Fallacy.

ONCE upon a time I believed in the tropics, but that was a great many years ago; I have seen too much of those wretched pretenders to believe in them any more, and I have made up my mind to denounce and expose them before an indignant world. The hoary old deceivers shall deceive no longer, if word of mine can strip the tawdry disguises from their shabby faces; no longer shall they hide themselves behind their cloak of gorgeous colours, or trick themselves out hypocritically with flaunting flowers, beautiful birds, and brilliant butterflies. They have decked their nakedness too many centuries already in these false theatrical properties, and now they must come out into the open light of day, to exhibit the rags and tatters which form their everyday vestments. To put the whole matter in a nutshell, there are no tropics. The entire conception is a sham and a delusion, an elaborate humbug perpetrated by whole generations of travellers, the baseless fabric of a disordered dream.

Of course I am not going to deny all those dreadful astronomical facts which we learnt in our hapless childhood at a fee of two guineas extra, under the mysterious designation Use of the Globes.' I am quite prepared to admit that Cancer and Capricorn have a real external existence, and that the sun annually performs all kinds of antics when he reaches their invisible limit, only discernible to nautical eyes by the aid of a sextant and a marine binocular. I have had the evidence of my own senses to the peculiar way in which my shadow has run north, south, east, or west, and finally disappeared under my feet, after I had once crossed that intangible barrier of twenty-three something north (thank Heaven, I've forgotten the minutes, though the degrees will haunt my memory till the end of my days); and I have experienced all the horrors of a vertical sun, pouring his red-hot rays straight down on my devoted head for months and years together. These physical and geographical phenomena I am not going for a moment to dispute, nor do I wish to join the eccentric squadron of earth-flatteners, who march solemnly forth under Mr. Hampden's guidance to do battle with Galileo, Copernicus, Newton, Mr. Wallace, and the Astronomer Royal. The tropics of science may rest undisturbed; but the tropics of poets, painters, lovers, romancists, and travellers, I venture to assert, do not exist, and