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 economy of the energies of the community--is
only beginning; the economy of fuel, the limitation of smoke and fogs
being symptoms of this and pointing to a more economic organisation of
industrial activities generally. But this next carries with it the
improved efficiency of the producers themselves, with whom, however, the
standpoint changes from the mere economisation of physical energies to
the higher economy of organic evolution. The convention of traditional
economics, that the productive capacity of the actual labourer is the
sole concern of his science, thus gives place to what is at once the
original conception of economics and the evolutionist one, viz., that