Light and Miscellaneous Prose

HUMANITIES 443 black-and-white illustrations. Also included are several pages of magnificent colour plates. This is primarily a book of reference, not a field gUide. Still, in these days of automobiles, there is nO reason why such a book should not be part of a field naturalist's travelling library. At any rate it should be in his home library and in every school and public library. This is a most valuable contribution to the proper understanding of one aspect of Canadian nature that hitherto has not been easily accessible. It is most welcome. Those who have sought information on Canadian birds have not been as badly off as those more interested in mammals but, until a few months ago, they have had to rely chiefly On a useful but badly out-of-date book, The Birds of Canada by P. A. Taverner. Now with the publication of an excellent new volume, The Birds of Canada (Queen's Printer, pp. 428, $12.50), by W. Earl Godfrey this gap is filled. Like the older book, it is issued by the National Museum of Canada as a Bulletin in their Biological Series. Every bird that has ever occurred in Canada is discussed, and all those that are resident or regularly migrant are considered under the heading of description, measurements, field marks, habitat, nesting, general range, Canadian range, and subspecies. To these informative sections are added first-class line-drawings showing important diagnostic details and distributional maps, the latter being a most valuable introduction that alone makes this book a great advance upon its predecessor. Everyone who uses this book will be immensely grateful to Dr. Godfrey for his scholarly text and to John Crosby for his lively, life-like, and revealing colour plates. My feeling is that it will have a long and meritorious life of service in this country, and the author, the artists, the National Museum of Canada, and the Queen's Printer are to be congratulated upon so signal a contribution to Canadian life. (R. M. SAUNDERS) LIGHT AND MISCELLANEOUS PROSE I expo, you export, she expose (he explode), we exploit, you exploit, they s'exploit. 100 Years of What? (Ryerson, pp. ix, 45 [text], n. p. [illustrations], $3.50) ask Eric Nicol and Peter Whalley, in their latest slang and 444 LETTERS IN CANADA dunce routine on our national heritage. In the text, Mr. Nicol peppers his potshots liberally and non-politically, his verve slightly outdistancing the illustrations of Mr. Whalley, though the gap is less than formerly. In the mix are old and authentic, and new and improved versions of Canadian history, with half the bulk being occupied by Mr. Whalley's interpretations of happenings in each year since Confederation. You are to guess the meaning, and you won't: most are much too hard. (And one year is confused with the next-you find it, Mr. Whalley.) The villain throughout is the Excited States: the reductive ballad serving as proem and envoi begins with "Ten little provinces sitting in a line," and ends with "One little province, Canada alone; / Uncle Sam inhaled, and then there was none." All is not 6nally lost, however; Mr. Nicol unabashedly finds our cohesiveness not in blood, choler, or black bile, but in phlegm: cool and beaverish, we may undercut. "If Canadians can be drawn together," he concludes, "by the passion of objectivity, by the ardour to remain disinterested, by the great and compelling urge to supend [sic] all judgment other than the rational and mature, we shall automatically be a people unto ourselves, in a world mostly gone mad" (p. 45). In 1965 Mr. Whalley cleaned up (you'd better not believe it) with his Broom, Brush, and Bucket, or How to Improve Mrs. Beaton without Really Trying. The good old girl turns up again this year in a guise which indicates a weakness in Mr. Nicol's work that one doesn't expect; he's too political. In God Bless our Home: Domestic Life in Nineteenth Century Canada (Bums & MacEachern, pp. ix, 233 [plus 5 pp. of nineteenth -century advertisements]' $9.50), Una Abrahamson draws upon the cupboards and shelves of Canadiana to piece out an increaSingly...