In the paper read on Monday at a meeting of the Sociological Society by Professor GEDDES—­an abstract of which we print—­are contained ideas of practical value to be recommended to the study of ambitious municipalities.  This is the age of cities, and all the world is city-building.  Almost everywhere is a flow from the country town-ward.  China and India may be still, in the main, lands of villages.  But the West, Russia perhaps excepted, is more and more peopled by dwellers in cities.  In a dim sort of way many persons understand that the time has come when art and skill and foresight should control what so far has been left to chance to work out; that there should be a more orderly conception of civic action; that there is a real art of city-making, and that it behoves this generation to master and practise it.  Professor Geddes truly said the land is already full of preparation as to this matter; the beginnings of a concrete art of city-making are visible at various points.  But our city rulers are often among the blindest to these considerations; and nowhere probably is to be seen a municipality fully and consistently alive to its duties in this respect.  London may be left out of the question.  Still a province rather than a city in the strict sense, wanting what, in the view of the early master of political science, was an essential of the true city, that it could “easily be overseen,” with a vast floating population, it will be some time before it can be dealt with as an organic whole.  But the rulers of such communities as Manchester and Newcastle and York ought long ago to have realised, much more than has been done, that they are not so much brick and mortar, so much rateable area, so many thousands of people fortuitously brought together.  They have all a regional environment of their own which determined their origin and growth.  They have all a rich past, the monuments of which, generally to be found in abundance by careful, reverent inquirers, ought to be preserved; a past which ought to be known more or less to all the dwellers therein, and the knowledge of which will make the present more interesting.  Even when old buildings have disappeared, ancient roads, pathways, and streets can be traced; place names keep alive much history; and the natural features reveal to the practised eye what must have been the look and condition of a town in past ages.  Professor Geddes gives a sketch of what he conceives the vast and ever-growing literature of cities will one day be.  Even if the comprehensive monographs which he foreshadows are never [Page:  140] written, it is not surely fanciful to expect that, with education universal, almost every dweller in our old towns will acquire some sort of that feeling with which a member of an ancient family looks upon its ancestral house or lands—­will, even without much reading, have some sort of notion of his predecessors and a certain pride in his membership of an ancient community.  If he has not the good fortune to be a De Vere, a De Bohun, a Howard, Mowbray or Cavendish, he may perhaps be a citizen of a town which flourished when some of these families were unknown.