horoughly than ever by the Industrial Revolution, with its
factories, railways, steamships, and all that they bring with them.
Thus, for instance, almost more important than the internal
transformation and concentration wrought by railway and telegraph, is
the selection, amidst the almost innumerable seaports of the older
order, of the very few adapted to the deep draught of modern ships. In a
word, not only does the main series of active cities display traces of
all the past phases of evolution, but beside this lie fossils, or linger
survivals, of almost every preceding phase.

Hence, after many years of experiment and practice in teaching sociology
I still find no better method available than that of regional survey,
historical as well as geographical. Beginning with some popular
excursion of obvious beauty and romantic interest like that to Melrose,
we see with every tourist how naturally and fully the atmosphere and
tradition of the Border found its expression and world influence in Sir
Walter Scott. Thence, passing by way of contrast through the long
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 impressiven