Biotechnics : the practice of synthesis in the work of Patrick Geddes

This he saw, as we can see in Belfast today, was a considerable factor in political unrest.

The Outlook Tower on the Castle Hill at Edinburgh—‘the world’s first sociological laboratory’, as it has been called—has. been allowed to fade and die, though the camera obscura in its. turret can still be visited, and should be. The loss of this type museum is a serious one—though many of its implications have been followed up in other places and other contexts. There are indeed within a hundred yards of it two examples of the saving and transforming of fine old town houses that were degenerating into slums. At Gladstone’s Land the Saltire Society keeps one of these tall old mansions in good condition for the display and study of many things Scottish; and at Lady Stair’s house there is a good museum of the three popular Scottish classics in the field of literature, Burns, Scott and R. L. Stevenson. But neither of these comes anywhere near making the points that the old Outlook Tower made so brilliantly by its synthesized presentation of all sides of life within their environment, animate and inanimate. What is lacking is not the artistic element, or the historic, or the antiquarian, but the scientific—the very morphology of life, that becomes living and real by the correct juxtaposition of diverse and interacting elements that reveal life as organism.

Geddes’ contribution to educational thought and practice is a big enough subject for a lecture in itself. Here I will refer only to his influence on the teaching of geography, which has been completely transformed in the last half century, and to his successful advocacy of survey methods as part of school work. This has many applications, and Environmental Studies are now a recognised feature in schools. In one branch of more advanced geographical work Geddes has stimulated the studies of ‘Human Geography’, particularly pioneered by the French, and his is one of the first voices to call for the study of the Earth as the Home of Man. The idea of “Tracing History backwards’ by taking the children, say, to the Parish Church, and getting them to think and ask questions of how it came to be there and to have acquired its various architectural features, is another example of a ‘subject” revivified by Geddes’ influence.

The Land Utilisation Survey of England was carried out with very considerable help from school children under the directly

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