simplicity of this descending hierarchy from mountain-hamlet to ocean-metropolis; but it is useful for the student constantly to recover the elemental and naturalist-like point of view even in the greatest cities.  At times we all see London as still fundamentally an agglomeration of villages, with their surviving patches of common, around a mediaeval seaport; or we discern even in the utmost magnificence of Paris, say its Place de l’Etoile, with its spread of boulevards, but the hunter’s tryst by the fallen tree, with its radiating forest-rides, each literally arrow-straight.  So the narrow rectangular network of an American city is explicable only by the unthinking persistence of the peasant thrift, which grudges good land to [Page:  107] road-way, and is jealous of oblique short cuts.  In short, then, in what seems our most studied city planning, we are still building from our inherited instincts like the bees.  Our Civics is thus still far from an Applied Sociology.

B—­THE HISTORIC SURVEY OF CITIES

But a city is more than a place in space, it is a drama in time.  Though the claim of geography be fundamental our interest in the history of the city is supremely greater; it is obviously no mere geographic circumstances which developed one hill-fort in Judea, and another in Attica, into world centres, to this day more deeply influential and significant than are the vastest modern capitals.  This very wealth of historical interests and resources, the corresponding multiplicity of specialisms, more than ever proves the need of some means by which to group and classify them.  Some panoramic simplification of our ideas of history comparable to that of our geography, and if possible congruent with this, is plainly what we want.  Again the answer comes through geography, though no longer in mere map or relief, but now in vertical section—­in the order of strata ascending from past to present, whether we study rock-formations with the geologist, excavate more recent accumulations with the archaeologist, or interpret ruins or monuments with the historian.  Though the primitive conditions we have above noted with the physiographer remain apparent, indeed usually permanent, cities have none the less their characteristic phases of historic development decipherably superposed.  Thus below even the characteristically patriarchal civilisations, an earlier matriarchal order is often becoming disclosed.  Our interest in exploring some stately modern or Renaissance city is constantly varied by finding some picturesque mediaeval remnant; below this some fragment of Roman ruin; below this it may be some barbarian fort or mound.  Hence the fascinating interest of travel, which compels us ever to begin our survey anew.  Starting with the same river-basin as before, the geographic panorama now gains a new and deeper interest.  Primitive centres long forgotten start into life; pre-historic tumuli give up their dead; to the stone circles the