in which again the appropriate qualities and defects must
be expressed, even as is the quality and twist of the hemp in the
strength of the cable, or as is the chemistry and the microscopic
structure of the alloy in the efficiency of the great gun. [Page: 63]
Our neighbouring learned societies and museums geographical, geological
and the rest, are thus avowedly and consciously so many winter shelters
in which respective groups of regional surveyors tell their tales and
compare their observations, in which they meet to compare their
generalisations from their own observations made in the field with those
made by others. So it must increasingly be for this youngest of
societies. We may, we should, know best our Thames valley, our London
basin, our London survey; but the progress of our science implies as
increasingly varied and thorough an inquiry into rustic and civic
regions and occupations and resultants throughout the whole world
present and past, as does the corresponding world survey with our
geologic neighbours.

I plead then for a sociological survey, rustic and civic, region by
region, and insist in the first place upon the same itinerant field
methods of notebook and camera, even for museum collections and the
rest, as those of the natural sciences. The dreary manuals which have
too long discredited those sciences in our schools, are now giving place
to a new and fascinating literature of first-hand nature study.
Similarly, those too abstract manuals of civics which are at present
employed in schools[5] must be replaced by concrete and regional ones,
their abstract counsels of political or personal perfection thus also
giving place to a corresponding regional idealism which may then be
supplemented from other regions as far as needs demand and circumstances
allow.

[5] For a fuller review of these, compare the writer's "City
Development," in _Contemporary Review_, October, 1904.

C--GEOGRAPHICAL DETERMINISM AND ITS DIFFICULTIES

To interpret then our tangle of ideas, both of the city and its
citizens, let us now bring more fully to our transverse valley sections,
and to each occupation separately, the geographical view-point which we
have found of service to elucidate the development of towns and cities
upon its longitudinal [Page: 64] slope. But this is neither more nor
less than the method of Montesquieu, whose classic "Esprit des Lois"
anticipates and initiates so much of that of later writers--Ritter,
B