Raymond S. Sayers, the editor, was a professor of Romance languages at Queens College of the City University of New York and senior lecturer in Portuguese at Columbia University. In an introduction, he points out: “Both Portugal and Brazil have been active contributors to and participants in Occidental culture, and so the present and future conditions of all aspects of their culture should e interesting to other nations. Professor Franca states in his essay on urbanization in Lisbon that in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the other European nations were ignorant of the lessons in city planning that the Portuguese were forced to learn after the earthquake, but such ignorance should not exist today.”