Science and Citizenship 



c'himney stacks. The ideal citizens, pictured in the 

 carbonaceous logic of his occupation, are stokers 

 and chimney-sweeps. It requires little observation 

 and less historic insight to verify the affirmation, 

 that urban expansion in the nineteenth century 

 was largely determined by the unavowed but real 

 ideals of a coal civilisation. 



The archaeologists who are so industriously de- 

 ciphering the buried histories of cities, have found 

 the accumulated survivals of seventeen different 

 cities in Rome. And so for other historic cities, 

 the successive phases of city formations are marked 

 by layers of superimposed debris like geological 

 strata, with which indeed they are in direct con- 

 tinuity. Each successive civic formation is char- 

 acterised by the impressions and the marks of its 

 contemporary inhabitants, which survive in material 

 structures like so many sociological fossils. Looked 

 at from this point of view, the coal-laden trucks and 

 the factory chimney stack with all their associated 

 structures, economic and aesthetic, are actual or 

 incipient sociological fossils of the coal cities of 

 the nineteenth century. 



To the dwellers in these coal towns for cities 

 in the proper sense they most of them are not 

 science presents itself as a kind of inverted philo- 

 sopher's stone. The accumulated applications of 

 science in the coal civilisations did not end with 

 the production of gold, but rather began with it, 

 more particularly that in Australia and California 

 about mid-century. Given a possession or control 

 of sufficient quantity of the precious metal, the 



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