do for three hundred towns what
has been done for Dunfermline. Half of what we are now spending on our
army and navy would enable us to endow thirty more of such towns
annually.

Mr. ISRAEL ZANGWILL in _To-day_ (Aug. 10, 1904), said: The Sociological
Society is forging ahead at American speed; the professors jostle one
another, and Geddes treads on the heels of Galton. After "Eugenics," or
the Science of Good Births, comes "Civics," or the Science of Cities. In
the former Mr. Galton was developing an idea which was in the air, and
in Wells. In the latter Professor Geddes has struck out a more novel
line, and a still more novel nomenclature. Politography, Politogenics,
and Eu-Politogenics, likewise Hebraomorphic and Latinomorphic and
Eutopia--quite an opposite idea from Utopia--such are some of the
additions to the dictionary which the science of Civics carries in its
train. They are all excellent words--with the double-barrelled
exception--and still more excellent concepts. But I fancy the general
idea of them all could be conveyed to the man in the street under the
covering of "the human shell." This shell of ours is the city. It is the
protective crust we have built round ourselves. In a smaller sense our
house is our shell, but in a larger sense each house is only a lobe of
the complex and contorted whole. Geography shapes our shells from
without, and the spirit of our particular community shapes it from
within. History tells us how it has been shaped in the past, Art tells
us how it should be shaped in the future. Professor Geddes, in fact,
envisages our civic shell as becomes a brilliant biologist, who also
happens to be a man of historic imagination, ethical impulses, and
aesthetic perceptions. For the human shell is not merely geometrical and
architectural, like those of apian or beaverish communities; it holds
and expresses all those differences by which we are exalted above the
bee or the beaver. It is coloured with our emotions and ideals, and
contorted with all the spirals of our history. And all these
manifestations of humanity may be studied as systematically as those of
the lower orders of creation, which have till recently monopolised the
privilege of pin and label. The old lady who admired the benevolence of
Providence in always placing rivers by the side of large towns was only
expressing in an exaggerated way the general failure to think of Civics
scientifically. The geographers, in whom may be found t