Making Ontario. Agricultural Colonization and Landscape Re-Creation before the Railway by J. David Wood (review)

HUMANITIES 261 of singing high notes with a brilliant, nasal tone. Such accounts put a human face on the search for physiological truths. Of further interest are Stark=s surveys of vocal registers and the evolution of knowledge on the subject, and a Germanic technique for breath control (Stauprinzip) as it compares with an Italianate approach to breathing (Appoggio). His depth of research in presenting opposing viewpoints is both formidable and reassuring. Manuel Garcia (acclaimed as the inventor of the laryngoscope) explored his own larynx in order to map its function and discover its proprioception in more detail. With the help of colleagues at the Gronigen Voice Research Lab in the Netherlands, Stark has followed in kind, stating that with the findings of Garcia and the Lampertis, >each generation must try anew to understand their meaning and significance.= The appendix of the book contains the results of this research, which the author carried out by >using himself as the singer-subject.= With a sampling from only one person, and that person being the author, this research is too modest to be substantive or conclusive on any recognized scientific basis. However, it does give a historical nod to Garcia=s work, as well as initiate a modern and more quantitative look at his theories and how they can clarify the specialized phonation required of singers. In Bel Canto: A History of Vocal Pedagogy, Stark has brought together the worlds of voice teacher, laryngologist, and acoustician in a highly readable and informative resource. Never before has this information been more accessible. This is a treasure trove for all those interested in the human voice, and helps them to >reason why= B with specific information, old and new. (DARRYL EDWARDS) J. David Wood. Making Ontario. Agricultural Colonization and Landscape Re-Creation before the Railway McGill-Queen=s University Press. xxviii, 206. $55.00 David Wood tells of Ontario during the time required for the first settlers of European origin to multiply their numbers to become a million strong, a process which stretched from 1780 to the early 1850s. He examines their early encounters with the land and their achievement in creating a workable society. >The colony,= he concludes, was not a >clone=: instead >it had become an amalgam of New World and Old B a compromise between British allegiance ... and North American know-how and flexibility.= He organizes his presentation around themes which explore the confrontation with nature, the imposition of order on the land, the peopling of the land, the creation of social order, the nature of agriculture, communications, and the planting of towns. These are staples of geographical accounting of settlement. Wood=s achievement is less to offer his readers a novel analysis 262 LETTERS IN CANADA 2000 than to focus on a period which has been slighted by recent scholarship which has shown little interest in considering it seriously on its own merits. Wood turns our attention to a period when the colony has had a bad press. It was the time of the Rebellion and of the Family Compact. We are apt to remember Robert Gourlay and Anna Brownell Jameson, Susanna Moodie and Catharine Parr Traill B observers whose critical judgments of the place are famous. Yet Wood=s reader encounters a different mood in the pages of this book. Ontario is for him a place of striving; it is where the energetic and optimistic farmer, preferring to settle in the forest rather than in open areas, is busy girdling, junking, chopping, grubbing, and burning in the process of eliminating the trees to prepare the land for agriculture. When he discusses the nascent social structure of the colony he divides his treatment into categories of social function and dysfunction, thereby assuring that recognition of mechanics= institutes, fraternal associations, and the distribution of patenting accompanies a discussion of alcoholism, poverty, and crime. This book is about progress, a word Wood doesn=t mind invoking. It is about achievements which preceded the railway era, about how the conditions which made the huge investments in such projects as the railways and the creation of a modern society possible. Wood is at pains to demonstrate that the grand program of modernity did not...