more excellent concepts.  But I fancy the general idea of them all could be conveyed to the man in the street under the covering of “the human shell.”  This shell of ours is the city.  It is the protective crust we have built round ourselves.  In a smaller sense our house is our shell, but in a larger sense each house is only a lobe of the complex and contorted whole.  Geography shapes our shells from without, and the spirit of our particular community shapes it from within.  History tells us how it has been shaped in the past, Art tells us how it should be shaped in the future.  Professor Geddes, in fact, envisages our civic shell as becomes a brilliant biologist, who also happens to be a man of historic imagination, ethical impulses, and aesthetic perceptions.  For the human shell is not merely geometrical and architectural, like those of apian or beaverish communities; it holds and expresses all those differences by which we are exalted above the bee or the beaver.  It is coloured with our emotions and ideals, and contorted with all the spirals of our history.  And all these manifestations of humanity may be studied as systematically as those of the lower orders of creation, which have till recently monopolised the privilege of pin and label.  The old lady who admired the benevolence of Providence in always placing rivers by the side of large towns was only expressing in an exaggerated way the general failure to think of Civics scientifically.  The geographers, in whom may be found the bases of the science, have always pointed out that the river system is the essential unit for investigation.  From source to sea goes the line of evolution.  And yet even the peasant hamlet at the source depends, as [Page:  144] Professor Geddes reminds us, on the hinterland of pasture, forest, and chase; and the hunter is the germ of the soldier and the aristocrat.  The whole region contributes to the ultimate city, as the whole river to the ultimate sea.  The Professor says, justly enough, that we should try to recover the elemental or naturalist point of view, even for the greatest cities.  He sees London as “fundamentally an agglomeration of villages with their surviving patches of common around a mediaeval seaport.”  This is accurate vision; but when he discerns “even in the utmost magnificence of Paris, say, its Place de l’Etoile, its spread of boulevards, but the hunter’s tryst by the fallen tree, with its radiating forest rides, each literally straight,” I cannot help suspecting the over-ingenuity of a prolific intellect.  The view of London as a growth from embryos, and the view of Paris as the outcome of atavistic instinct, belong to different planes of scientific thinking.  That Haussmann in reconstructing Paris was merely an unconscious hunter and woodlander, building as automatically as a bee, is a fantastic hypothesis; since cities, if they are to be built on a plan at all, cannot avoid some unifying geometrical pattern; and there are not very many possibilities....