ABSTRACT
The second great phase of urban development began in Britain with the Industrial Revolution in the latter half of the 18th century, but it did not seriously affect the Continent until the middle decades of the 19th. The whole phase falls into two stages, the first characterized by the railway and the steam engine, the second by the internal combustion engine and the dynamo, the two stages being divided approximately by the turn of the 20th century. The second stage is also associated, throughout the Western countries of advanced civilization—the United States and Canada and all the countries of western Europe—with a deep-seated biological phenomenon, namely, a falling birth-rate. Among the Slav and Magyar peoples in east-central Europe, however, the birth-rate remains high.
