Such pride, or, as the lecturer preferred to term it, such “growth of civic consciousness and conscience, the awakening of citizenship towards civic renascence,” will be the best security for a worthy city of the future....

Professor Geddes glanced at the opening civic future, “the remoter and higher issues which a city’s indefinitely long life and correspondingly needed foresight and statesmanship involve,” the possibilities which may be easily realised if only there be true civic pride, foresight, and unflagging pursuit of a reasonable ideal....  It remains to be seen what our cities will become when for some generations the same spirit of pride and reverence shown by old families as to their possessions has presided over all civic changes and developments....  Ruskin somewhere points out the mediaeval love of cities, unwholesome, dirty, and forbidding though they were.  He did not teach his generation that that affection might with more reason attach to the modern city if its people knew what it had been and steadily strove to make it better, if there was in every large community patriotism and a polity.

DR. J.H.  BRIDGES in The Positivist Review (Sept., 1904), said:  Under the title, “Civics, as applied Sociology,” Prof.  Geddes read on July 18th a very interesting paper before the Sociological Society.  The importance of the subject will be contested by none.  The method adopted in handling it, being in many ways original, invites remark ...

What is wanted is first a survey of the facts to be dealt with—­a regional survey.  This point of view has next to be correlated with corresponding practical experience acquired by practical civic life, but “aiming at a larger and more orderly conception of civic action."....  Students of Comte will not forget his well-known maxim, Savoir pour prevoir, afin de pourvoir.

What is to be the area of survey?  Prof.  Geddes decides that the City may be taken “as the integrate of study.”  Whether any modern towns, and, if so, what, may be taken as integrates in the sense which would undoubtedly apply to ancient Athens or to mediaeval Florence, may be questioned; but it is too soon to interrupt our author....  Every one who heard the lecturer must have been fascinated by his picture of a river system which he takes for his unit of study; the high mountain tracts, the pastoral hillsides, the hamlets and villages in the valleys, the market town where the valleys meet, the convergence of the larger valleys into a county town, finally, the great city where the river meets the sea.  The lecturer went on to advocate the systematic study of some of the principal river-basins of the world for the purpose of examining the laws which govern the grouping of cities.  All would agree that much instruction might be derived from such [Page:  141] a survey, provided two dangers be avoided.  One is the exaggeration of the influence of the environment on the social organism, an error into which the Le