O NE of the striking aspects of the recent interest in social reconstruction has been the increasing emphasis upon the community as a social unit of real significance. The term, community, is by no means a new invention, for in its original meaning of common life it has long been a familiar concept descriptive of the natural grouping of people in small, local areas, a characteristic type of association handed down from the earliest historical times. The tribal community among pre-literate peoples, the village commune in mediaeval Europe, the Utopian communities of the nineteenth century, bear sufficient witness to the long history of this term and the common sense meaning that was ordinarily attached to it. Prior to the opening of the present century, there was occasional reference to the community in the literature of the social sciences but for the most part only in a casual way, and it was not ordinarily deemed of sufficient importance to be given special mention in an index or table of contents. Among the first English books to use this term in their title were Sir Henry Maine's Village Communities published in I87I and F. Seebohm's The English Village Community which appeared in I890. The gradually evolving interest in the community as a suitable unit for serious study received great impetus from the publication in England of such books as Booth, Life and Labour of the People in London, (i89z); Rountree, Poverty: A Study of Town Life; and Besant, East London, both published in I9OI. In Amnerica, this interest in social problems centering in the congested quarters of great cities found expression in two volumes of Riis, How the Other Half Lives and The Battle of the Slum.. While these books, published in I890 and i892, were impressionistic descriptions lacking Booth's zeal for statistical facts, they were none the less revealing and convincing. Another landmark in these early community studies was Hull House Maps and Papers which was published in 1895 by residents of Hull House. An unusual feature of this volume was a colored map showing graphically the location of the different nationalities in a downtown section of the city, a type of study which foreshadowed the more elaborate ecological studies undertaken many years later. The first beginnings of the utilization of the statistical method in American books in this field are seen in Weber, The Growth of Cities in the Nineteenth Century: A Study in Statistics (i899), and in the volume by Hunter, Tenement Conditions in Chica go: Report by the Investi-