In a time when scientific and scholarly intellectual activity has come more and more to be conducted by persons holding appointments in universities, or, if not in universities, then in research institutions, Lewis Mumford has a special claim upon our respectful attention. He inherited no significant sum of money from his relations and only infrequently has he been a beneficiary of the patronage of private foundations. His autobiography, Sketches from Life,[1] says nothing about his having been sent abroad, even once, under the auspices of the United States Information Agency or any governmental cultural propaganda organization. His major works were written before the National Endowment for the Humanities came into existence. He has never been an editor responsible for publishing a magazine with the burdens and income such a post provides. Lewis Mumford might be our only surviving Privatgelehrter—the only author of scholarly works who has gained his livelihood as a free-lance writer. Authors of biographies and of popular historical works sometimes do very well and of course some novelists of merit, after many years of penury and eking out a meager livelihood, earn large sums from their writings, and some novelists of little merit receive very large sums indeed. Lewis Mumford has written twenty-eight books and a very great number of articles. Several of these books have been based on an amount of research that would do credit to a diligent university teacher who is able to concentrate mainly on research while doing only six