Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 86.djvu/52

48 always feel sure of a welcome at these neighborly gatherings. In fact he must needs be careful, if his collecting trip should take him across a plantation at tea time, not to be captured by the proprietor. Within the planter's home the visitor will find many of the comforts and some of the luxuries of modern life. There are books, magazines and newspapers that keep the planter in touch with the outside world. Often there is a piano, brought ten or fifteen miles over the mountain trails on the shoulders of negroes. Members of the family who play the instrument may often show good evidence of a training gained in England or on the Continent.

Finally, it is a matter of no small concern that a permanent tropical station for British and American workers, should be located in an English-speaking country, with a stable government and reliable sanitary control, and in one readily reached from the United States and Europe. Jamaica has the advantage of not being subject to revolutionary upheavals. Its quarantine against the entrance of tropical disease is strictly maintained, and there is a good postal service. There are 2,000 miles of good roads in the lowlands, and two of these already reach within five or six miles of Cinchona. Similar roads are soon to replace other of the well-kept bridle trails already built in the Hills. Thus by railroads, roads and bridle paths all parts of Jamaica are accessible from Cinchona. The island itself can be reached from the United States in four or five days, from five Atlantic ports, while the voyage from England takes but ten or twelve days.

We are to have available then a laboratory, readily accessible, and in a very favorable location, of which Professor D. H. Campbell, who has studied tropical vegetation in many lands, writes:

I can think of no place where the fern vegetation is so rich and where other types of tropical vegetation are more accessible.

We believe the opportunity here offered will be more and more frequently embraced by botanists, and that this laboratory in the western tropics will doubtless, as was suggested by Goebel, "be of the very greatest importance to the science, and will give a strong impulse to the study of botany in America." Jamaica will then be honored among men of science for the maintenance of this laboratory, as Holland has been for the support of the famous station at Buitenzorg.