Thus, as we see the popular survey of regions, geography in its literal and initial sense, deepening into the various analyses of this and that aspect or element of the environment which we call the natural sciences—­but which we might with advantage also recognise as what they really are, each a geolysis—­so these sciences or geolyses, again, are tending to reunite into a higher geography considered as an account of the evolution of the cosmos.

Again, in the column of School, corresponding to Work, we have the evolution of craft knowledge into the applied sciences, an historic process which specialist men of science and their public are alike apt to overlook, but which is none the less vitally important.  For we cannot really understand, say Pasteur, save primarily as a thinking peasant; or Lister and his antiseptic surgery better than as the shepherd, with his tar-box by his side; or Kelvin or any other electrician, as the thinking smith, and so on.  The old story of geometry, as “ars metrike,” and of its origin from land-surveying, for which the Egyptian hieroglyph is said to be that of “rope stretching,” in fact, applies far more fully than most realise, and the history of every science, of course already thus partially written, will bear a far fuller application of this principle.  In short, the self-taught man, who is ever the most fertile discoverer, is made in the true and fundamental school—­that of experience.

The need of abbreviating the recapitulation of this, however, sooner or later develops the school in the pedagogic sense, and its many achievements, its many failures in accomplishing this, might here be more fully analysed.

Still more evident is this process in the column of Folk.  From the mother’s knee and the dame’s school of the smallest folk-place, the townlet or hamlet, ton or home, up to the royal and priestly school of the law of ancient capitals, or from the “humanities” of a mediaeval university to the “Ecole de Droit” of a modern metropolis, the series of essential evolutionary stages may be set down.  Or in our everyday present, [Page:  79] the rise of schools of all kinds, primary, secondary, higher up to the current movement towards university colleges, and from these to civic and regional universities, might again be traced.  The municipalisation of education is thus in fact expressed, and so on.

Leaving the schools in the main to speak for themselves of their advancing and incipient uses, a word may be said upon the present lines.

As a first and obvious application of this mode of geographic study of cities appears the criticism, and; when possible, the amendment of the city’s plan, the monotonous rectangularity of the American city, and the petty irregularity more common in our own, being alike uneconomic and inartistic because ungeographic, irrational because irregional.  With the improvement of communications, the physicist’s point of view thus introduced—­that of the