and the knowledge
of which will make the present more interesting. Even when old buildings
have disappeared, ancient roads, pathways, and streets can be traced;
place names keep alive much history; and the natural features reveal to
the practised eye what must have been the look and condition of a town
in past ages. Professor Geddes gives a sketch of what he conceives the
vast and ever-growing literature of cities will one day be. Even if the
comprehensive monographs which he foreshadows are never [Page: 140]
written, it is not surely fanciful to expect that, with education
universal, almost every dweller in our old towns will acquire some sort
of that feeling with which a member of an ancient family looks upon its
ancestral house or lands--will, even without much reading, have some
sort of notion of his predecessors and a certain pride in his membership
of an ancient community. If he has not the good fortune to be a De Vere,
a De Bohun, a Howard, Mowbray or Cavendish, he may perhaps be a citizen
of a town which flourished when some of these families were unknown.

Such pride, or, as the lecturer preferred to term it, such "growth of
civic consciousness and conscience, the awakening of citizenship towards
civic renascence," will be the best security for a worthy city of the
future....

Professor Geddes glanced at the opening civic future, "the remoter and
higher issues which a city's indefinitely long life and correspondingly
needed foresight and statesmanship involve," the possibilities which may
be easily realised if only there be true civic pride, foresight, and
unflagging pursuit of a reasonable ideal.... It remains to be seen what
our cities will become when for some generations the same spirit of
pride and reverence shown by old families as to their possessions has
presided over all civic changes and developments.... Ruskin somewhere
points out the mediaeval love of cities, unwholesome, dirty, and
forbidding though they were. He did not teach his generation that that
affection might with more reason attach to the modern city if its people
knew what it had been and steadily strove to make it better, if there
was in every large community patriotism and a polity.

DR. J.H. BRIDGES in _The Positivist Review_ (Sept., 1904), said: Under
the title, "Civics, as applied Sociology," Prof. Geddes read on July
18th a very interesting paper before the Sociological Society. The
importance of the subject will be contested by