isolated peninsula of Fife, say to representative towns like Kirkcaldy
and Largo, we still see the conditions of that individualism of which
Adam Smith and Alexander Selkirk ("Robinson Crusoe") have each in his
way become the very prototypes. In such ways the connection of regional
geography, history, and social psychology becomes increasingly clear.
Again, we explore the other old Fife seaports, a series of survivals
like those of the Zuyder Zee, or again work out in the field the
significance of Stirling, so often the strategic centre of Scotland.
Again, Dunfermline, as early mediaeval capital and abbey, furnishes a
convenient object lesson preparatory to the study of the larger
Edinburgh. Here, again, its triple centre, in the port of Leith, the
Royal Castle, the Abbey of Holyrood, are the respective analogues of the
port of London, the Tower, and Westminster; while each city-group has
its outlying circle of minor burghs, tardily and imperfectly
incorporated into a civic whole. Again, such a marked contrast of civic
origins and developments as those of Glasgow and Edinburgh has to be
accounted for; and thus through such progessively complexer surveys we
reach the plane of modern civic problems and policies. Understanding the
present as the development of the past, are we not preparing also to
understand the future as the development of the present?

The impressiveness of the aspect of Edinburgh to its visitors is thus
not [Page: 109] merely pictorial. Be the spectator conscious of this or
no, it turns primarily upon the contrast of the mediaeval hill-city with
its castle ramparts, its fretted cathedral crown, with park and
boulevard, with shops, hotels and railway stations. But the historic
panorama is unusually complete. See the hill-fort defended by lake and
forest, becoming "_castrum puellarum_," becoming a Roman and an
Arthurian citadel, a mediaeval stronghold of innumerable sieges, a
centre of autocratic and military dictatures, oligarchic governments, at