"human scale" should have seemed quite without appeal during the mechanical centuries. The natural tendency of the enlarged community of the city is to increase the intensity and accelerate functions of every sort whether of speech, or crafts, or currency and exchange. This in turn, implies an inevitable extension of these actions by subdivision or, what is the same thing, new invention. So that even though the city was formed as a kind of protective hide or shield for man, this protective layer was purchased at the cost of maximized struggle within the walls. War games such as those described by Herodotus began as ritual blood baths between the citizenry. Rostrum, law courts, and marketplace all acquired the intense image of divisive competition that is nowadays called "the rat race." Nevertheless, it was amidst such irritations that man produced his greatest inventions as counter-irritants. These inventions were extensions of himself by means of concentrated toil, by which he hoped to neutralize distress. The Greek word ponos, or "toil," was a term used by Hippocrates, the father of medicine, to describe the fight of the body in disease. Today this idea is called homeostasis, or equilibrium as a strategy of the staying power of any body. All organizations, but especially bio- logical ones, struggle to remain constant in their inner condition amidst the variations of outer shock and change. The man-made social environment as an extension of man's physical body is no exception. The city, as a form of the body politic, responds to new pressures and irritations by resourceful new extensionsٛ always in the effort to exert staying power, constancy, equilibrium, and homeostasis. The city, having been formed for protection, unexpectedly generated fierce intensities and new hybrid energies from accelerated interplay of functions and knowledge. It burst forth into aggression. The alarm of the village, followed by the resistance of" the city, expanded into the exhaustion and inertia of empire. These three stages of the disease and irritation syndrome