1The subject of this article is the Scottish thinker Patrick Geddes (1854–1932) and his international context. The American theorist of cities Lewis Mumford famously wrote: ‘Geddes’s Scotland embraced Europe and his Europe embraced the World’ (Mumford 383). As George Davie has pointed out (Davie 24) Patrick Geddes was an inheritor of the Scottish Enlightenment philosophical tradition of interdisciplinary thinking. Aspects of that Scottish tradition, in particular the work of Thomas Reid, were a model for French thinkers, inspiring among others Victor Cousin. The influence of Scottish ideas in France was balanced by the influence of French ideas in Scotland, and by the time Geddes was working what has been described as the Edinburgh-Paris axis had been active since the early nineteenth century as a means of importing French political and scientific radicalism (Livingstone 271). The purpose of this article is to explore that interrelationship of Scotland and France through Geddes’s work, not least through his activities in both Paris and Montpellier, and to give that work a wider global context. While Geddes’s contribution to France was notable, so also was France’s contribution to Geddes. One gets a further sense of Geddes’s breadth of thinking from his friend the Bengali poet and educator Rabindranath Tagore who wrote in 1920 that Geddes ‘has the precision of the scientist and the vision of a prophet; and at the same time the power of an artist to make his ideas visible’ (Defries xiii). Mumford’s words catch Geddes’s internationalism, Tagore’s words capture the interdisciplinary expanse of his thought. This article explores that interdisciplinarity by considering how it informs Geddes’s international context, primarily with respect to France but also India and the USA.

Biographical and Cultural Context: European Connections and the Visual Arts

2Patrick Geddes was born in Ballater in Scotland in 1854, and he died in France in 1932, at the Collège des Écossais he had founded in Montpellier. He was one of the most remarkable thinkers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. An ecologist before that discipline had even been defined, he was also a founder of sociology, and of town planning. He was a geographer of note. He was a theorist of the evolution of cities, but not just a theorist for he was an urban community activist, improving historic areas that had fallen into disrepair, and making gardens to enhance community life. Underpinning all that he was an advocate of the importance of the arts to everyday life and for everyone. His achievements were substantial, interdisciplinary and international. In academic terms from 1888 to 1919 he was Professor of Botany at University College Dundee in Scotland. On retiring from Dundee, he took up the post of Professor of Sociology and Civics at the University of Bombay in India.

3A fundamental connection for the entirety of his career was with France. The intellectual traditions of both Scotland and France were of profound importance to him, and the Franco-Scottish relationship is particularly relevant to explore his wider activities. Cities, and Geddes’s attitude to them, are also considered here in particular the Scottish city that became Geddes’s home, namely Edinburgh, and two French cities of very different scale and character that influenced him throughout his career, namely Paris and Montpellier; and finally, an American city with which he had close links, namely Chicago. Geddes was profoundly interested not only in the structure of cities but in the way each city related to the ecology and economic possibilities of its region, and how cities themselves evolve over time, transmitting and developing culture. Geddes’s wider international networks can be introduced around such urban points of reference. For Geddes international travel for as many people as possible was fundamental to both the peace of the world and to the well-being of the individual. He wrote in 1920, while Europe was recovering from the First World War: ‘The reunion of Europe . . .  can most strongly, even if slowly, be made through the education of travel . . .  combining the best of modern cultural travel with something of the old spirit of pilgrimage’ (Geddes 1920, 118). Geddes’s use of the word ‘pilgrimage’ gives us a clue to how he approached the world. He did so with a sense of reverence.

4A further theme developed here is Geddes’s commitment to the importance of visual art. He thought of art as something to contemplate, as something to learn from, and as something to make. As such it was an activity that everyone should engage in. In his final lecture to University College Dundee in 1919 he said: ‘we need to give everyone the outlook of the artist, who begins with the art of seeing—and then in time we shall follow . . .  into the seeing of art, even the creating of it’ (Macdonald 157; Defries 186). He thus saw the creating of art as an essential tool for thought, not simply as an ideal but as a psychological necessity.

6In due course a black and white version of the design under the title The Way to Rheims appeared in Geddes’s magazine The Evergreen: Book of Summer in 1896. It is captioned: Franco-Scottish Society—Sorbonne, 18th April 1896, marking the first meeting of the society in France. Duncan’s image reflects the days when Scots were frequently in military alliance with the French, an alliance which found new impetus in the Jacobite period in the eighteenth century. An interesting consequence of the latter period was Napoleon’s Maréchal Macdonald, who was the son of a Scottish Jacobite refugee from the Outer Hebrides. He is commemorated in Paris by a statue on the north side of the Louvre by Eugène Léon L’Hoest, and by a boulevard named in his honour. For Geddes and for Lang the Franco-Scottish Society which met at the Sorbonne in 1896 was thus a reiteration of a long-established relationship.

8The art historian Duncan Macmillan has noted Davie’s influence on his own thinking (Macmillan 2005, 207) and developed Davie’s insights with respect to visual art, not least with respect to the interest of French artists in Victor Cousin’s thinking. He explores this in his book Scotland and the Origins of Modern Art (Macmillan 2023, 155–58, 187–88). There is much of interest in Macmillan’s text, including the influence of Cousin’s thinking (and by extension Scottish philosophy) on Delacroix. The ideas flowed both ways between Scotland and France. The historian of geography David Livingstone has noted that ‘the Edinburgh-Paris axis, around which Geddes’s own intellectual life revolved, had been in service since the early nineteenth century as a means of importing French political and scientific radicalism into Britain’ (Livingstone 271). Livingstone draws on Adrian Desmond, The Politics of Evolution, in particular Desmond’s section: ‘The French Morphologies and Their Scottish Importers’ (Desmond 41–92). For George Davie, Geddes was both forward looking and at the same time a representative of the traditional Scottish philosophical approach to education (Davie 1961, 24, 337–38).

9Geddes studied with Darwin’s follower T. H. Huxley in London. But, always an independent thinker, he found what he considered to be Huxley’s too easy rejection of the positivist ideas of Auguste Comte a good reason to explore the ideas of that key French thinker for himself. Geddes would later reflect on how as a student in London in 1874 he read about and pondered over Huxley’s controversy with Comte’s supporter Richard Congreve, so much so that he concluded that Huxley’s criticisms were missing the essential significance of the new doctrine (Geddes 1926, 1). It is typical of Geddes’s Scottish generalist approach that he should admire Huxley, and value him as his teacher, while at the same time exploring what he saw as the blind spots in Huxley’s thinking. Although Huxley may have disagreed with Geddes about the value of Comte, he made a crucial French academic link for Geddes by finding him a place with the biologist Henri de Lacaze-Duthiers, a professor of note at the Sorbonne. Geddes first attended Lacaze-Duthiers’s marine station at Roscoff in Brittany in 1878 and that experience led him the same year to Paris where he explored the 1878 exposition and listened to lectures by Louis Pasteur. Another lecturer he discovered in Paris in the winter of that year was Edmond Demolins, a follower of the pioneering sociologist Frederic Le Play. In due course it was from Le Play that Geddes derived his three interacting descriptive categories of place, work and folk, which he would use as the analytical basis for his human-ecological regional surveys. Siân Reynolds, in her assessment of Geddes’s academic and political contacts in France, sums up the significance of Comte and Le Play by pointing out that what Geddes borrowed from Le Play was the need for a thorough sociological survey of a region, one of his key preoccupations, while in Comte he found the concept of the hierarchical structure of knowledge (Reynolds 2004, 71). Demolins was close in age to Geddes; they became friends, and in due course Demolins would lecture for Geddes in Edinburgh in the 1890s. When Geddes co-founded the Sociological Society in London in 1903, its base was called Le Play House. Geddes’s development of an environmental sociology owes much to Le Play, and the regrettable loss of that approach, has been explored by Maggie Studholme (Studholme 36791). Another French thinker close in age to Geddes with whom he was certainly in touch in the 1880s was the outstanding botanist, Charles Flahault. In 1881 Flahault joined the University of Montpellier and in 1883 he became Professor of Botany. He founded the Institut de Botanique in 1890 and in that year the Geddes family visited him in Montpellier. In 1888 Geddes had himself been appointed Professor of Botany at University College Dundee in Scotland.

Scientific and Aesthetic Intersections

10Geddes’s French links were by no means limited to his scientific side. His interdisciplinary magazine The Evergreen, published in Edinburgh in 1895 and 1896, was a remarkable combination of visual art, poetry, short stories, and essays on ecology and sociology. The embossed leather covers each had a tree of life motif in art-nouveau style designed by the artist Charles Mackie, who was a frequent visitor to France and had strong links with French artists. Mackie was a close friend of Paul Sérusier who at his invitation contributed to The Evergreen: Book of Spring published in 1895. Sérusier’s contribution, Pastorale Bretonne, serves to underline the pan-Celtic aspect of the magazine for the culture of Brittany was very much part of the mix of material published by Geddes. On the basis of correspondence between Mackie and Sérusier the possibility has been raised that Sérusier painted a mural for Geddes’s apartment in Edinburgh (Willsdon 1984, 88–91; Willsdon 2000, 326). What is certain is that a mural project was discussed and Sérusier’s work is linked in theme and format to murals that Mackie painted for Geddes. Sérusier introduced Mackie to Gauguin and like both those French artists he was strongly influenced by Japanese prints, in particular the vertical landscapes of Hiroshige. One can see that Japanese influence clearly in his image, Lyart Leaves which appeared in The Evergreen: Book of Autumn, published in 1895. But here we find Mackie also, as in his covers, making an ecological and seasonal reference for lyart is a Scots word referring to the streaky appearance of leaves in autumn. It is also an allusion to Robert Burns’s poem, The Jolly Beggars, which begins: ‘When lyart leaves bestrew the yird’ which one can translate as ‘when autumnal leaves bestrew the earth’. In the prefatory note to that same issue, Geddes and his colleague Victor Branford similarly emphasise an ecological and seasonal theme, advocating return to nature as a rallying call which each age must answer in its own way (Geddes and Branford 1895, 8). A further visual expression of that seasonal rallying call are the almanacs that appear in each issue, drawn by two other artist colleagues of Geddes, Helen Hay and Nellie Baxter.

11From the point of view of science, that imperative of return to nature found an outstanding research expression in Geddes’s Department of Botany at University College Dundee, for it was there that Geddes’s students helped to bring into being the new discipline of ecology. Those pioneering Scottish ecologists were not just Patrick Geddes’s students they were Charles Flahault’s students also, for the exceptional quality of their botanical work owed a great deal to methods developed in Montpellier. The developing skills of Geddes’s students were focused by visits to Flahault’s department where they were introduced to the French school of phytogeography (Burnett 1). One of those pioneering students was the talented but short-lived Robert Smith who accompanied Flahault on numerous surveying expeditions during the winter of 1896–1897 (Sheail 8). On his return he worked on the first vegetation maps of Scotland, printed by the notable map-maker J. G. Bartholomew. In the Scottish Geographical Magazine Smith wrote of his survey work:

. . .  it is necessary to point out the principle upon which [the botanical survey] is based, as it was largely by the experience gained while accompanying Professor Flahault on numerous surveying expeditions in France that I have been able to conduct similar experiments in Scotland, and to prepare the map which is now issued. (Smith 387)

12Alexander Mather has called that period around 1900 the golden age of vegetation mapping in Scotland (Mather 49). We must, therefore, acknowledge Flahault’s work in Montpellier as a key part of that Scottish golden age. Murals also played their part in Montpellier. Belinda Thomson has drawn attention to Max Leenhardt’s role making murals for Flahault’s Institut de Botanique including one which shows Flahault at work on a botanical survey. Geddes was keen for Leenhardt to come and make work in Edinburgh but he was unable to do so (Thomson 50–51). Geddes probably had the idea of establishing a Scots College in Montpellier as early as the 1890s. He took inspiration from the Scots College which had been founded in 1325 as one of the colleges of the University of Paris. That notion of European universities as international not just in outlook but in their very formation was fundamental to Geddes’s own educational outlook. His vision for his Collège des Écossais came into being eventually in 1924, and, as I have noted, he died in Montpellier in 1932. It was Charles Flahault who spoke at his funeral. Flahault himself would die in 1935 and an article in the influential British scientific journal Nature from that year discusses a proposed memorial to him. It makes clear the close working relationship between the two men:

The unbroken friendship of the late Sir Patrick Geddes and Flahault . . . led to the founding of the Scots College (Le Collège des Écossais) at Montpellier . . .  The garden of the College with its wide variety of garrigue flora was planned by the two friends as an ecological museum of Mediterranean vegetation. . . .  Recently, at the College itself, the warden, M. Paul Reclus, has aided the supervision of ecological studies by British students. Thus the work of Flahault is continued, not only by his successor M. Pavillard at the University, but also at the College where so much of his time was spent. (Nature 1935, 841)

14An insight into Geddes’s respect for Paul Reclus is indicated by the publication, by Geddes and Colleagues, of Reclus’s account of the Dreyfus Case, a book which appeared in at least three editions in 1898. One must bear in mind that it was only in January of that year that Zola had published, J’accuse. The case itself was only fully resolved several years later. But before he had even met Paul Reclus, Geddes had not only admired but also worked with his uncle, Élisée Reclus. Geddes was in sympathy with anarchist ideals of social justice and decentralised power, and he numbered among his friends the Russian anarchist, geographer and social thinker Pyotr Kropotkin. Kropotkin’s Scottish network was substantial (Ferretti 2019, 195). Geddes entertained him in Edinburgh in 1886 (Macdonald 2020, 51–53) and it was Kropotkin who made the introduction between Geddes and Reclus, writing to Reclus in praise of Geddes’s activities devoted to improving conditions in the Old Town of Edinburgh (Boardman 87). Subsequently Reclus wrote of Geddes’s work:

We are told that in Edinburgh, the lovely Scottish capital, pious hands are at work . . .  breaking in upon its picturesque but unclean wynds, and transforming them gradually, house by house—leaving every inhabitant at home as before, but in a cleaner and more beautiful home, where the air and light come through; grouping friends with friends, and giving them places of reunion for social intercourse and the enjoyment of art. Little by little a whole street, retaining its original character, only without the dirt and the smells, comes out fresh and crisp, like the flower springing clean beneath the foot without a single sod being stirred around the mother plant. (Reclus 1895, 262)

15Reclus’s respect for Geddes’s methods could hardly be clearer. His essay was entitled The Evolution of Cities and Geddes pays homage to him in the title of his own 1915 book, Cities in Evolution. By the time Reclus’s words were published in 1895 he had visited Geddes in Edinburgh and contributed to his programme of interdisciplinary summer meetings, pioneering examples of the kind of summer schools and conferences we now take for granted (Reynolds 2004, 74). One participant recalled of those summer meetings that ‘students came from England, Scotland, France, Italy and Germany; among the lecturers in addition to Professors Geddes and Arthur Thomson were Élisée Reclus the geographer and his brother Elie Reclus, Edmond Demolins and Abbé Klein’ (Sharp 250). Arthur Thomson was a distinguished student and colleague of Geddes who would become professor of natural history (i.e. biology) at the University of Aberdeen in 1899. Both Demolins and Klein were followers of Le Play. This short list thus yields up—along with anarchism—biology, geography, and sociology. The writer of those comments was Elizabeth Sharp, a significant cultural activist herself not least as an editor both of women’s writing and of Celtic poetry. Her anthology Lyra Celtica was a collaboration with her husband William who was another key figure of Geddes’s Celtic revival group, writing both under his own name and his pseudonym of Fiona Macleod. The design of Lyra Celtica was by Helen Hay, who was herself one of the summer meeting teachers, offering a course on Celtic art.

16In 1895 Reclus also published La Cité du Bon Accord in the second volume of Geddes’s Evergreen. The essay, published in French, outlines an organic future community of people united by friendship (Reynolds 2022 online). That was no doubt a utopian notion but one founded on the recognition by Reclus that communities could evolve and should evolve into better places to live, a view fundamental to Geddes’s thinking also. There is an interesting footnote to that essay in which Geddes not only draws attention to Reclus’s recent visit to Edinburgh but notes that he is the foremost geographer in Europe, and in addition the ‘joint-apostle with Tolstoi of the higher Anarchism’ (Geddes 1895, 103). That conjunction of writer and geographer is characteristic of the interdisciplinary ethos of The Evergreen.

17Soon both Élisée Reclus and Patrick Geddes were thinking ahead to the Universal Exposition that would take place in Paris in 1900. Reclus, despite still being officially exiled from France in Brussels, proposed a great globe so large that it would bring people into consciousness of the entire planet (Ponte 2020, 128–43). That visionary work was never constructed but Reclus’s globe would have enabled visitors to recognise the geographical features of the planet itself in some detail, enabling each viewer to place themselves personally in relation to the planet, very much as Geddes’s Outlook Tower enabled people to place themselves with respect to a city and region. Like Geddes’s Outlook Tower, the globe was, as Tom Steele’s notes ‘conceived as a permanent teaching instrument that could be updated as the most recent data arrived from geographical explorations and surveys . . .  a powerful metaphor for the cosmic unity of human life’ (Steele online). In the 1890s Paul Reclus had worked on a related globe project for Geddes’s Outlook Tower in Edinburgh.

Citizen of the World: India and the United States of America

19The Paris 1900 exposition remained a major reference point for Geddes, not least when one considers his global perspective. Geddes’s first biographer, Philip Boardman, who studied with him at the Scots College in Montpellier in the 1920s, wrote:

That Geddes was an ardent Scot is conspicuous in his writings for The Evergreen. That he was an equally loyal and intellectual son of France stands out in many a deed and thought since his first trip to Brittany in 1878. Yet with the approach of the twentieth century he placed himself no less convincingly in a third category, [that] of world citizenship, without abandoning either France or Scotland. (Boardman 15354)

20There is no doubt that the Paris exposition of 1900 helped Geddes to express that idea of world citizenship more fully than ever before. His extensive lecture programme in Paris began in mid-May and continued to the end of October. It had both French language and English language sections. Lecturers included Outlook Tower regulars such as Geddes himself and John Duncan, and, in addition to those from France, speakers from both the USA and India, reflecting the global ambition of Geddes’s project. Geddes’s key Indian speaker was Swami Vivekananda who seven years earlier at the World Parliament of Religions in Chicago, had ‘presented Hinduism to the world at large as a major religion, emphasising its antiquity’ (Brockington 182). He was thus a figure of major significance in raising awareness of Indian culture in the West. He lectured for Geddes in Paris in August 1900. The topic of his lecture was the early history of Indian art, stressing the independence of the early Buddhist art of India from European influences (Guha-Thakurta 173). From today’s perspective it may seem strange there was any question of that aesthetic independence, but at the time it was a topic of cultural contention. Vivekananda’s position was a riposte to the British imperial attempt to imply that there was no tradition of fine art in India, or if there was it was merely an unimportant subsidiary of aesthetic developments driven by Europe. That denial of a high-status fine art tradition to India was, of course, a coded justification for imperial domination. So Vivekananda’s art historical claim made while lecturing for Geddes in Paris had a distinctly political edge.

21Geddes’s links to India would be important for the rest of his life. His key early contact with that culture was through a remarkable Irishwoman named Margaret Noble, who also worked with him in Paris in 1900. Under the name of Sister Nivedita, she had become a disciple of Vivekananda, but was also strongly influenced by Geddes’s thinking. Nivedita worked tirelessly on projects of cultural revival both in the arts and the sciences in Calcutta. After her death in 1911 some of her work was taken forward by another of Geddes’s friends, the art historian and cultural revivalist Ananda Coomaraswamy. Vivekananda himself had died in 1902 but the topic of the independent value of early Indian art that he had addressed in his Paris lecture was followed through by both Nivedita and Coomaraswamy. It fell to Coomaraswamy to write that art history from an Indian point of view. Appropriately enough, his first popular account, Arts and Crafts of India and Ceylon was published in 1913 by T. N. Foulis in Edinburgh, a publisher who also worked with Geddes (Macdonald 2020, 138–41). Thus, one can see Vivekananda’s lecture for Geddes in Paris as a key contribution to the cultural revival that was then developing in India; in due course that revival became one of the drivers of Indian independence.

22Of equal interest here is the USA, in particular with respect to another of Geddes’s speakers in Paris, namely Jane Addams. She was a guest of honour at a reception held by the American group of Geddes’s international assembly in June 1900. A report on that reception emphasises work of the assembly as conducive to peaceful relations between nations ‘through the encouragement it offered to international intellectual intercourse’ (Vivekanandaabroad online). Such commitment to world peace was fundamental to both Addams and Geddes. In 1915 Addams would form the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, an organisation committed to disarmament, and for that work she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for 1931. Addams was, like Geddes, a community activist, an educator and a sociologist. In 1889 with Ellen Gates Starr, she had co-founded the settlement of Hull House in Chicago along lines suggested by Toynbee Hall, founded in 1884 in London. The basic principle of such urban interventions whether in London, Chicago or in Geddes’s Edinburgh, was to bring educational and social resources into poorer and neglected areas of a city, not simply by philanthropic gift but by community activists moving into an area and addressing its needs through the provision of resources and expertise. That is what Geddes did in the Old Town of Edinburgh, that is what Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr did in immigrant Chicago. Crucially many of those resources were in the form of community research not least through detailed sociological surveys. Complementing that was culturally led teaching in the form of arts and crafts, drama, and history of art. Public lectures were also important, for example Vivekananda spoke at Hull House in 1893, Geddes spoke there in 1899, and Frank Lloyd Wright, who would become the USA’s most famous twentieth-century architect, spoke there in 1901. Thanks to the research of Annie Storr Geddes’s links to Chicago are becoming clearer not only with respect to Hull House but with respect to the early years of the University of Chicago. Had the funds been available to move his operations from Scotland Geddes would have been one of its first professors, and he retained strong links not least with the professor of sociology, Charles Zueblin, who called Geddes’s Outlook Tower ‘the world’s first sociological laboratory’ (Macdonald 2020, 89–90). In 1899 Geddes lectured to the Chicago Arts and Crafts Society at Hull House. As we have seen the following year Jane Addams returned the favour as part of Geddes’s programme in Paris.

23Geddes’s Chicago links are underlined by John Duncan’s appointment in 1900, at Geddes’s suggestion, as professor of art at the newly formed Chicago Institute, run by the pioneering educator Francis Wayland Parker. Parker was a generation older than John Dewey, also working in Chicago, and the case for the influence of his pedagogical practice on Dewey has been made convincingly by Ronald Kellum. In Parker Geddes had thus placed Duncan with one of the most significant educators of the time. On Parker’s death in 1902 Duncan moved on to work at Hull House. He became what was known as a resident by which was meant a key contributor (Frank Lloyd Wright also had that role), and as well as teaching he painted mural panels of both Abraham Lincoln and Leo Tolstoy for the theatre. Those murals no longer exist but a memoir of a visit to Tolstoy by Jane Addams published in McClure’s Magazine in 1911 reproduces a version of Duncan’s image (Addams 295). That is another reminder of the interest in pedagogical murals during this period, whether one thinks of those of Puvis de Chavannes in Paris, Max Leenhardt in Montpellier or John Duncan in Edinburgh and Chicago. It is also a reminder that Geddes had in 1895 praised both Tolstoy and Élisée Reclus as proponents of the higher anarchism. Appreciation of Geddes’s educational ideas and their influence on those of Addams has been deepened by Marilyn Fischer in her book Jane Addams’s Evolutionary Theorising (Fischer 132). Their intellectual alignment demands more research, but it is a reminder of a key theme running through this article, namely Geddes’s commitment, shared with Addams, not simply as an educator but as a maker of places for education. One must now consider the Collège des Écossais in Montpellier once again, for it was originally intended by Geddes to be part of a wider campus including not only an Indian College (of which Rabindranath Tagore accepted the presidency), but an American College. That international campus was given profound cultural context by being sited in one of the oldest university cities in Europe. While such purpose-built campuses interested Geddes throughout his life, he was also keenly aware of how they related to their host cities for he saw the city itself as inherently educational, an agent of cultural transmission in continuous evolution. He writes about Paris:

Our true University is thus in the City; nay more, it is the City, great Paris herself. She is ever stretching out for us her fresh ideas, in the bright conversations of the salon and of the café; and so she diffuses them into the intellectual atmosphere and at every social level. (Geddes and Branford 1919, 345–46)

24Geddes understood that within every natural region there is a city, a key part of human evolution and of the evolution of the planet itself.

25To conclude, one can note again that Geddes, an inheritor of the Scottish philosophical tradition which had so impressed Victor Cousin, found in French thinkers such as Élisée Reclus, Paul Reclus, and Charles Flahault both inspiration and audience for his own thinking. Geddes’s commitment to France was fundamental both to his intellectual development and to his career as a whole, whether one considers the growth of his ideas, his friendships, the cities he responded to, or the colleges he built. For communicating his ideas, his involvement with the Paris Exposition of 1900 was invaluable. There one can note in particular his influence on India via Swami Vivekananda’s disciple Sister Nivedita, and on the USA via Jane Addams of Hull House in Chicago. The motto that guided Patrick Geddes throughout his career was Vivendo Discimus: By Living We Learn. It is an appropriate note to end on for it is carved into the very fabric of his college buildings both in Edinburgh and in Montpellier.