although like the homely Gilbert White or the world voyaging
Darwin, he may do his best work around his own home.

B--INITIAL METHODS OF CONCRETE SURVEY

Hence our civic studies began (vol. 1, p. 105) with the survey of a
valley region inhabited by its characteristic types--hunter and
shepherd, peasant and fisher--each on his own level, each evolving or
degenerating within his own region. Hence the concrete picture of such a
typical valley section with its types of occupation cannot be brought
too clearly before our minds.[3]

[3] Fig. 1.

What now of the causes of progress or decay? Are not these first of all
the qualities and defects inherent in that particular social
formation?--though we must also consider how these different types act
and react, how they combine with, transform, subjugate, ruin or replace
each other in region after region. We thus re-interpret the vicissitudes
of history in more general terms, those of the differentiation, progress
or degeneracy of each occupational and social type, and the ascending
and descending oscillations of these types. In short, these occupational
struggles underlie and largely interpret even the conflict of races,
upon which Mr. Stuart-Glennie and other sociologists have so ably
insisted. The fundamental importance of these initial factors of region
and occupation to all studies of races and types, of communities and
institutions, of customs and laws, indeed of language and literature, of
religion and art, even of ideals and individualities, must be my excuse
if I seem to insist, in season and out of season, upon [Page: 61] the
services of Le Play as one of the main founders of sociology; and this
not only _(a)_ on account of his monographic surveys of modern
industrial life--those "Monographies Sociales" from which our current
economic studies of the condition of the worker, of the family budget,
etc., descend--but _(b)_ yet more on account of his vital reconstruction
of anthropology (albeit still far from adequately realised by most
anthropologists) through his renewed insistence upon the elemental
rustic origins of industry, family types, and social organisation alike,
from these simplest reactions of man in his struggle for existence in
varied and varying environment.

It does not suffice to recognise, with many economists, hunting,
pastoral and agricultural formations, as states _preliminary_ to our
present industrial and commercial, imperial, and financial ord