Science and Citizenship 



by the noblest type of the human species. The 

 designing and the making of a suitable theatre on 

 which the human play may develop is a thought 

 which gives a new orientation to the geographical 

 conception of the river valley. Now the soil and 

 the vegetation which cover its floor, the beds of 

 coal, iron, sand, and limestone which underlie its 

 surface, the forests which clothe its slopes and 

 shelter its animal world, the metalliferous deposits 

 of its mountain sides, the river which from source 

 to sea invites to locomotion, all these are seen to 

 be but energies and instruments awaiting for their 

 orchestration the tuning hand and the idealising 

 mind of man. And the city the city which em- 

 banks and strides the river, which stretches across 

 the plain and juts into the ocean, which ascends 

 the hill slopes or penetrates the mountains what 

 is the part and place of this city in the vision of 

 the humanist geographer ? 



When we think of the river valley as the regional 

 unit of geographical science, we have to remember 

 that it is like the ovum of biology a developing 

 unit containing the potency of a great realisation. 

 What to the geographer in his humanist mood is 

 the city but the effort of this regional unit to 

 realise its own potency for evolution. City de- 

 velopment is thus for the geographer no isolated 

 phenomenon, but a normal stage the culminating 

 one in a long sequence of events and processes. 

 It is the ceaselessly renewed attempt to make for 

 each region, here and now, its own Eden its 



own Utopia. 



247 



