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

than once described of how he cleaned up Indore by getting himself made, in effect, Maharajah for a day and staging a highly imaginative pageant for the festival of Diwali which included a great rat covered with highly enlarged fleas, and high distinction showed to the refuse-sweepers who were garlanded and honoured. The procession was to go along the streets which were judged the best kept. It is pleasant to see how Geddes had prepared for such a use of pageantry some time before, in Dublin, where he had organised a procession of eighty Irish mayors in their robes and chains as part of a pageant in connection with his Civics Exhibition. It may be of interest to recall here what was said about him by Rabindranath Tagore: “What so strongly attracted me in Patrick Geddes when I came to know him in India was, not his scientific achievements, but, on the contrary, the rare fact of the fullness of his personality rising far above his science. Whatever subjects he has studied and mastered have become vitally one with his humanity. He has the precision of the scientist and the vision of the prophet; and at the same time, the power of the artist to make his ideas visible through the language of symbols. His love of Man has given him the insight to see the truth of Man, and his imagination to realise in the world the infinite mystery of life and not merely its mechanical aspect.’

One of the greatest setbacks of Geddes’ life was the loss of the ship, sunk by the raiding cruiser ‘Emden’, carrying his exhibition of cities (twenty years’ work) to India in 1914. But immediately he set to work and built up another. As he wrote to his wife at the time:

‘There is no doubt we are at the making of a new science, a

finer geography, a more concrete and vital history—a more real

interpretation of human life, and this in all its aspects, from economic to psychological and ethical!’

A loss from which he never quite recovered was that of his son Major Alisdair Geddes, described as ‘the best observer in the British Army’. Then came an even more crushing blow. His wife and constant working partner died.

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