Nature

NATURE 435 categories (such as 'Futurism and plastic arts') which are described (and listed above) might be modified to take into account and make the reader more aware of this focus. Once again, the University of Toronto Press has played about with typography and design, in an apparent effort to confuse the reader and increase the price. Still, this is no fault of the author's, and his work is well worth the attention of all scholars of futurism and the arts. (J.E. CHAMBERLIN) NATURE R.D. Symons, Siltan Seasons: From the Diary of a Countryman. Toronto: Doubleday Canada 1975, xiv, 200, $7.95 Drawn by the challenge of the opening Canadian West, R.D. Symons left a secure English home before the First World War to live the free and demanding life of cowboy, woodsman, and rancher in this new land. From a long, self-reliant career he and his wife retired to Silton, a small village in Saskatchewan, in an area he had known as a youth, where they spent the last few years of his life before his death in 1973. This book is a record of those years and of his views on life in general. No matter what his work or position Symons always lived close to nature, sensitive to her every mood, conscious and appreciative of all his fellow-creatures in the natural world, be they bird, plant, or animal. Artistic son of an artist father, he has always been able to draw, paint, and depict his fellows of the wild with perceptive conviction, as his other books bear witness. In these last years of his retirement he shows the same interests and ability, so that the delicacy of the prairie crocus, the unfettered life of the badger, the sweet aroma of the wolf willow, the endlessly rich colouring of the snow come across in persuasive pleas from his pages - pleas for the protection and preservation of all that is simple, true, and natural. Integrally a part of this lifelong companionship with nature is a deepset belief in the simple, straightforward human values upon which he has relied all his life and which he finds particularly associated with the self-reliant and creative rural life of the older pattern, illustrated here by his accounts of life in Silton. This life and its values he sees as being today basically threatened by the massive pressures coming from the big city and the over-sophisticated, industrialized society it represents. This makes him sad and resentful but does not fully overwhelm his hope that people in sufficient number will awaken to what is being lost in time to make salvage possible. Through all his book runs finally a religious vein, strong and vivid, a conviction that the ultimate source of sound values and the good life is to be found only with God. 436 LETTERS IN CANADA Terry Shortt, Not As the Crow Flies. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart 1975, 255, $12·95 Terry Shortt, as a boy of eleven, shot a crow and then, holding it in his hand, discovered in the shimmering, changing tones of its plumage, in the symmetry of its structure, that 'a crow was beautiful!' From that moment, it seems, and steadily thereafter the desire to become a painter of birds and a naturalist awoke and drew along with a dream of visiting the far corners of the earth to see and to paint their wonderful wildlife. It was a long, slow, and circuitous route from his native Winnipeg and commercial art to an assistantship at the Royal Ontario Museum of Zoology in Toronto in 1930, to the headship of its Life Sciences Department of Art and Exhibits in 1948, and the final realization of his boyhood dream. From earliest years to his current position as eminent bird artist and architect of life-evoking museum exhibits, Terry has retained a sense of wonder and delight in his contacts with all wild creatures, a oneness with nature, a 'sympathetic association.' Hence he can be alone in the starkest wilderness yet never lonely, for he feels part and parcel of it all. He has travelled far and wide, always with every sense on the...