Apart from its great function as a plaything, science is valuable only to the extent that its researches can be brought to bear upon the conditions in a particular community, in a definite region. The difference between science as a plaything and science as an instrument for enabling us to establish more effective relations with other men and with the rest of our environment, is the difference between firing a shot at a target and firing at a buck for provender. The practice one gets in firing at a target is great fun, and incidentally it improves one’s marksmanship; such idle sport is perhaps one of the stigmata of a civilized community. Nevertheless, unless one’s skill can be definitely brought home it remains a personal achievement; and the community as a whole is not a pound of meat the better for it. If science is to play the significant part that Bacon and Andreæ and Plato and the other great humanists desired it to, it must be definitely brought home and realized in our here and now. The need for this humanization of science has already been perceived in Great Britain. During the last decade a movement has gathered headway in the schools and extended itself to associations outside the schools. The title of this movement is “Regional Survey,” and its point of origin is, I believe, the Outlook Tower in Edinburgh which was well described more than two decades ago as the “world’s first sociological laboratory.” The aim of the Regional Survey is to take a geographic region and explore it in every aspect. It differs from the social survey with which we are acquainted in America in that it is not chiefly a survey of evils; it is, rather, a survey of the existing conditions in all their aspects; and it emphasizes to a much greater extent than the social survey the natural characteristics of the environment, as they are discovered by the geologist, the zoologist, the ecologist--in addition to the development of natural and human conditions in the historic past, as presented by the anthropologist, the archæologist, and the historian. In short, the regional survey attempts a local synthesis of all the specialist “knowledges.” Such a survey has been conducted in the Southeastern counties of England under the auspices of various local scientific societies; and the result of it is a complete description of the community’s foundations, its past, its manner of working and living, its institutions, its regional peculiarities, and its utilization of physical, vital, and social resources. Each of the sciences draws upon its general body of knowledge to illuminate the points under observation; and when problems arise which point definitely to the lack of scientific or scholarly data, new trails are opened and new territory defined.