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
prévoir, 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