ress are
having their turn as monument builders. Our Old Edinburgh is thus the
most condensed example, the visible microcosm of the social evolution
which is manifest everywhere; so that as a teaching model of
sociological development it may renew its educational attractiveness
when its improving hygiene has lessened its medical advantages.

Setting down now these phases of historical development in tabular form,
we have a diagram such as the following:--

ANCIENT | RECENT | CONTEMPORARY | INCIPIENT
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Primitive | Matri- | Patri- | Greek | Mediaeval | Renaissance | Revolution | Empire | Finance | ? ? ?
| archal | archal | and | | | | | |
| | | Roman | | | | | |

which, were it placed erect, we might now compare to the increasing
[Page: 110] nodes of a growing stem, or rather say the layers of a coral
reef, in which each generation constructs its characteristic stony
skeleton as a contribution to the growing yet dying and wearying whole.
I have elaborated this example of the panoramic aspect of Old Edinburgh
as a widely familiar instance of the method of literal survey with which
social and civic studies may so conveniently begin; and I press the
value of extending these even to the utmost elaborateness of
photographic survey: in my view, indeed, a sociological society has at
least as much use for a collection of maps, plans and photographs as of
statistics, indeed scarcely less than one of books. Of course, in all
this I am but recalling what every tourist in some measure knows; yet
his impressions and recollections can become an orderly politography,
only as he sees each city in terms of its characteristic social
formations, and as he utilises the best examples from each phase towards
building up a complete picture of the greatest products of civic
evolution, temporal and spiritual, of all places and times up to the
present. Such a parallel of the historic survey of the city to that of
its underlying geological area is thus in no wise a metaphoric one, but
one which may be worked out upon maps sections and diagrams almost
completely in the same way--in fact, with little change save that of
colours and vertical scale.