Patrick Geddes

Abstract

IN so much as Mr. Boardman succeeds in conveying a vivid picture of Geddes' dynamic personality, the wide sweep of his interests, and to some extent of the contribution which Geddes made as a teacher, as a pioneer in sociology and as a creative thinker in town and regional planning, he may be held to have succeeded in his purpose. Patrick Geddes is probably most widely known as the joint author with J. Arthur Thomson of "The Evolution of Sex" and "Outlines of General Biology", and Mr. Boardman's study should indicate to a fresh generation something of the vitality, the stern common sense and realism, the breadth of scholarship which marked Geddes in his wanderings as student or as professor, and brought him into more creative enterprises than any other man in the three decades preceding the outbreak of the War of 1914–18. His adventurous spirit stands out afresh from these pages, and the appeal of the book to youth is enhanced by the picture of his pioneer enterprise in starting a students' hall of residence at the University of Edinburgh or of his subsequent contribution to the renovation of Edinburgh Old Town. Prof. Geddes' services in adult education, as an apostle of town-planning and the undoubted parent of the regional survey, his unceasing warfare oh specialization, all find a place, though one would not draw from this book quite the impression of Geddes as inspiring a new and creative conception of social service to which Mumford paid tribute in "The Condition of Man".

Patrick Geddes

Maker of the Future. By Philip Boardman. Pp.xix + 504 + 13 plates. (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press; London: Chapman and Hall, Ltd., 1944.) 30s. net.