evolution, temporal and spiritual, of all places and times up to the
present. Such a parallel of the historic survey of the city to that of
its underlying geological area is thus in no wise a metaphoric one, but
one which may be worked out upon maps sections and diagrams almost
completely in the same way--in fact, with little change save that of
colours and vertical scale. The attempt to express the characteristic
and essential life and thought of a given region in each period upon a
series of maps is in fact the best method of understanding the everyday
map at which we commonly look so unthinkingly.

Much of the preceding, I am assured, must be most unsatisfactory to
those who look at cities only from the standpoint of so many committees
dealing with police, water, finance, and so on; or to those who are
content to view the magnitude, the wealth and the population, the
industries and the manufactures of a great city without considering
whence these have come and whither they are leading; equally
unsatisfactory also, I fear, to those to whom civic dignities and
precedence, or the alternations of winning political colours, appear of
prime importance. I can only hope that some of these may, on
consideration, admit that the points of view I have endeavoured to
outline above may be worth some thought and study as elementary
preliminaries to their own more special and developed interests; and if
the society permit. I hope to approach these more closely in a later
paper.

[Page: 111] The abstract economist or legalist, the moral or political
philosopher may also resent the proposed mode of treatment as an attempt
to materialise sociology by reducing it to concrete terms alone. But I
would reply that observation, so far from excluding interpretation, is
just the very means of preparing for it. It is the observant naturalist,