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 aesthetic 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. [Illustration: PAPAYA TREES] It takes just three conditions to make a good jungle, and these three are all present in this fascinating country. Moisture, temperature, and soil; mix them in the right proportions and you can produce a jungle at the North Pole, but nowhere can the mixture be located except in the tropics. When one remembers the painstaking toil expended on the rocky fields of northern New York and then turns to a land where the problem is not to encourage but to prevent growth, one wonders how it happened that our ancestors blundered into an environment reeking with difficulties when they might have had all this overflow of abundance for the taking. There are several brands of jungle, to be sure, and distinct differences of kind may be located easily. The jungle of the overflowed level river land is a very different formation from that which climbs over the rolling hills and up the mountain slopes. But everywhere there is the same reckless riot of power and life. Fantastic growths are here just because there is so much growing to do and so much energy back of the roots that there are not conventional forms of life enough to go around and life boils over in every conceivable absurdity of form and habit. This is no place for a niggard. But it is a splendid antidote for smallness of soul and for that dried-up-ness that settles down like a pall upon the spirits of men who never in their lives have had enough of anything or breathed an atmosphere of abundance.