Cities are of nature. Their long life flows in ways she has made longer than the changing rule of which they are part. Nations and boundaries are of man and his laws. Artificial creations all. Cities and their sites are of the same forces as form the rivers and ports, the passes and pathways on which they stand and last as long. Rome outlives its empire, and Damascus the shock of massacre from Chedorlaomer to Timur. The cities of Europe are still where they were twenty centuries ago. The civil structure into which they fit has changed until nothing is left of what once was. These things are missed in the general. They come to be seen in the particular. Philadelphia stands, and necessarily stands on the straight, ruler-like “Falls line” which passes through every city site from New York to Montgomery, because this prodigious slip changes river navigation wherever it crosses a river valley. Where marine navigation stopped to-day and then, Penn put his city, its site a peninsula about which two rivers joined, a rich alluvial plain, covered with glacial clay, with schistose rocks cropping out across it, the palæozoic marble of the Atlantic coast hard by, and a strip of green serpentine crossing the country from the highest points in the future limits of the city to Chester County, its first granary and feeding ground. These things—the half-sunken Lower Delaware River spreading into Delaware Bay, the term of navigation at the junction of two rivers, and the abrupt approach to the sea of a formation elsewhere miles from the ocean—make Philadelphia all it is in outer look, a flat city built of its own clay, garnished with its own marble, a seaport knowing the sea only in its rivers. [Illustration: READING THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE. FROM AN OLD FRENCH PRINT.] In this inland port, as you float in either river, seafaring masts and main rigging, black and tarred, silhouette against the tender green of growing fields. The early houses were brick of the glacier’s leaving, matching London in color; for both are ground out of the same earth mill. Its early stone houses were of the narrow contorted gray schists, and marble quarries had been opened, exhausted and closed to trim the brick before the Revolution. Later these were varied by the green serpentine, a hideous, dull color, the red sandstone of the fertile inland plains, and at last, as railroads made it easy to seek a door-step 1,000 miles away, the marble of Vermont built the City Hall, the granites of Cape Ann the Post Office, and Ohio ashlar a growing number of private homes, matching London once more as a close congener of the Portland stone Penn saw builded into St. Paul’s. The outer resemblance to London noted by Matthew Arnold and many an one besides, rests, as such things do, on concrete fact.