The Scottish sociologist, biologist, educator, and town planner Sir Patrick Geddes (1854-1932) is famous for his concepts and achievements in town planning.

Patrick Geddes, born in Ballater on Oct. 2, 1854, was brought up near Perth. Through boyhood explorations of Perthshire and the Highlands, Patrick learned to see rural and urban life as a whole and began to study all living things, including man, in relation to their environment. He graduated from Perth Academy at 16.

After an 18-month apprenticeship in a local bank, Geddes began studies of chemistry, geology, and biology, along with drawing and cabinetmaking. At 20, however, he found his real goal--zoology under T. H. Huxley. Then, while on an expedition to Mexico, a crisis of temporary blindness turned him from "eye-minded" extrovert into philosophical classifier of sciences and inventor of graphic "thinking machines" from folded sheets of paper. Thus arose his combination of Auguste Comte's sociology with Fr...