Prowling about Panama. George A. Miller
has missed something out of his life. He should go back and begin over again.
The jungle is much maligned and often misinterpreted. The jungle has a place in the agricultural life of the tropics, but it has also a place in the æsthetic and moral life of mankind. Here at last there is room, and the starved and stunted life may relax its struggle and strain and expand under the luxuriance and exuberance of a world where all the forces of life overflow and run riot in a thousand fantastic forms of energy and growth. Like the uncharted vastness of the polar sea and the unbounded, shimmering mirage of the wide desert, here at last there is plenty and to spare. When a man has stinted and economized all his life on a New England hillside amid stones and stumps, the jungle takes the load off his soul and sets him free in a universe of new and untested dimensions.
The jungle is misunderstood. There are jungles unworthy of the name, but these vast Panamanian hothouses are a different matter. They are not the bottomless morasses of deadly snakes and poisonous vapors. Since men have learned how to live in the tropics these terrors have largely retreated to the highly colored accounts of tropical travelers who took one look and fled—to write a book of timely warning to the uninitiated. These jungles are not the haunts of hidden horrors and poisoned arrows. Ferocious tree-dwellers may inhabit the unknown recesses of the upper Amazon, but they do not live in the jungles of Central America and Panama.
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